Out of Control Action Plan

How to Boost Your Reading Comprehension by Reading Smarter and More Conscientiously [Video]

2012-01-18T23:12:00.000-05:00

How to Boost Your Reading Comprehension by Reading Smarter and More Conscientiously [Video]:

With all of the things out there to read on the internet—all of the blogs we want to keep up with and all of the news funneled to us every day—how can you make sure you read each item in a way that really enriches your life? The short answer: You can't, not without help, anyway. Here's how you can stop, refocus, and change the way you read so you'll take more away from it.

Photo by Kevin Dooley.

Step 1: Reconsider What Reading Really Means to You

The video at the top of this post is from the comedy Portlandia, and like any great comedy, it speaks volumes about the world we live in. If you spend any time reading the web, you're probably at least somewhat aware of the dysfunctional relationship many of us (and possibly yourself included) have with reading. Many of us are so quick to have our say on a topic that we fail to read the articles we're commenting on, or you've made the mistake of launching into a dissertation yourself when the issue you have has already been addressed. Conflicting articles, research that points in different directions, people being fooled by scams and websites that have their own bias, magazine subscriptions piling up on our coffee tables—it seems like even though there's more information available to us, we're absorbing less and less of it.

In fact, it's really our relationship with reading and our ability to absorb information on a given topic that's at issue. Do you read the magazines and blogs you do because you really love their content and appreciate what they have to say? Or do you have a love/hate relationship with what you read, where you find yourself more irritated than thrilled when you open your most visited sites, or commenting only to say how much you dislike something instead of offering your own perspective or opinions? If reading seems like a chore to you, something you feel like you have to do to keep up, then your relationship with your media needs help. We're going to tackle that relationship one step at a time, and hopefully help you build a more positive, proactive approach to reading what you do on the internet, form your own informed ideas and opinions, and come out the other side committed to truly comprehending the things you take the time to read and enjoy.

Photo by Jayel Aheram.

Step 2: Stop, Refocus, and Build a Healthy Relationship with Reading

Stop and take stock of how you get your information. I asked Clay Johnson, author of The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption, about where this plague of poor reading comprehension came from, and he pointed out that the issue isn't the amount of information available, or even the technology we have to bring it to our eyes, it's that our relationship with reading needs re-evaluation. Here are three ways to stop and take stock of that relationship, and see whether what you read is really helping you think critically:

How much do you consume? Are you trying to read every popular tech blog on the web? How many do you really engage on, comment at, or share stories from? Perhaps you're casting your net wide because you don't want to miss anything, or because you feel like you have to read someone to stay informed. Let go of that perception, and consider trimming your feeds to the sites you really enjoy, communities you're actively involved in, and voices that inform and challenge your perceptions.

Who do you read? Are your feeds full of voices that all sound the same? When was the last time you read an article you disliked, not because of a typo or because you didn't like the topic, but because the subject matter made you uncomfortable and forced you to think about your opinion? Using politics as an example, Clay notes "If you're wondering why Washington can't get anything done, this model of information consumption is why: because one half of the country can choose to only hear what it wants to believe, they find the other side increasingly hard to get along with. This isn't just political though—politics is just an obvious example. The breadth of information available, skimming or long-form, hurts our ability to dive deep into the answers to our questions if we don't challenge ourselves to focus." Instead, include different voices in your media consumption, and use those perspectives to inform your own.

Is reading really the best way for you to learn? Are you spending a lot of time reading things that you feel like you should be up to date on, but just aren't absorbing? For example, for years I subscribed to a number of SecurityFocus mailing lists because I worked in IT, was interested in security, and felt like I should be up to speed on security news and part of a community of security-minded professionals. Unfortunately, I never read the messages, eventually switched to digests to cut down on the volume, and never read the digests either. I learned everything I needed to know about security from some of my favorite security blogs and my colleagues instead. If you're spending time skimming or reading a site, mailing list, book, or journal because you feel like you should get something from it, when there's a more effective option for your learning style available, put down the reading material now and don't look back.

To that last point, reading the written word isn't the only viable way to absorb information, and as long as we assume it is, the longer we do ourselves a disservice and make it more difficult to learn new things and expose ourselves to new ideas. Clay explains, "I think we have to let go of our dogmatic relationship with "reading." In the face of new technologies, being attached to the written word is a bit like being attached to vinyl records. Now I'm sure I've irritated both avid readers and avid audiophiles with this statement, but I think what we're really after here isn't reading comprehension but subject matter understanding and critical thinking."

"Reading is but one thing that helps us acquire and build those skills, and one one thing that requires those skills. But it isn't the only thing that requires those skills - it's just one way we consume information. We tend to attach some nostalgia to "reading" as the ultimate form of information intake, superior in some kind of intellectual way to all others, but can we really say that a kid can learn more out of a textbook than from the Khan Academy? I'm not so sure."

Step 3: Choose the Things You Spend Your Time Reading Wisely, and Include Multiple Voices

Next, reconsider the sources of information you expose yourself to. Clay pointed out that while it's easy to assume technology has a major role in how and where we absorb information, it doesn't define what and how we read, it's just a means to get the information in front of us. Instead, he notes, we have the ability to be much more selective about what we read, which can lead to difficulty really understanding a topic. "Beneath the surface though, I think something else is changing our comprehension, and that's choice." He continues, "what's different now than what used to be is selection and diversity, and I think that our ability to select only the information we want to hear has a really strong affect on our reading comprehension - it allows us to seek out information that confirms us more than information that informs us, making the synthesis of ideas very difficult."

When you look through your feeds, check to see if you're getting news from multiple trusted sources with differing viewpoints. Regardless of the topic you're passionate about, whether it's technology, politics, world news, economics, science, or medicine, focus on the topics you want to read about, discard the others that you skim or read because you feel like you have to (or that you get nothing out of), and then select a few trusted sources with differing viewpoints to help you stay on top of your preferred topics.

You'll find that as you read and expose yourself to differing viewpoints, you'll begin to build your own thoughts and opinions, form your own ideas, and even see the logic behind perspectives that differ from your own, even if you disagree. Plus, by eliminating the topics and feeds that cause you so much stress, you begin to transform your relationship with what you do read into something more positive, instead of an exercise in cleaning out an inbox.

The key here however is to make sure you pick trusted sources with different voices, and rein in your information fire hose to the topics you're really interested in and communities you're passionate about. Your goal at this stage is to go a mile deep and an inch wide—as in, stop trying to read every tech blog on the web and stick to the ones you really enjoy reading and challenge your opinions about the technology you love (and the technology you hate).

Step 4: Read Conscientiously, and Take Time to Absorb and Reflect on What You Read

Once you've whittled down the amount of information you absorb to the things you're really passionate about and the things you really want to read and engage with, it's time to actually read those things. Clay has some suggestions: "the number one piece of advice I have is to consume consciously and deliberately. Transform your relationship with information consumption into something that you do proactively, rather than something that happens to you. Once you do that, you can start applying frameworks - like the one I wrote about how to focus, and using tools like limiting your bandwidth."

Trimming the amount of data coming through your feeds and bookmarks doesn't mean that you should just spend less time reading, unless you plan to read less and learn more through other methods. Instead, the goal is to give you the freedom to really appreciate the things you do read about. For example, instead of reading an article and hammering out a knee-jerk reaction in the comments section so you can hurry up and move to the next unread item in your feed reader, this kind of conscious consumption allows you to stop, think over what you just read, seek out more information about topics mentioned that you don't understand very well, think about the author's viewpoint, and come to your own informed conclusion. Then you can engage in the discussion if you see fit, or even start your own conversation by writing an opposing or corroborating piece elsewhere, perhaps even on your own blog.

Conscientiously reading the topics you're passionate about from a variety of voices gives you the room to think critically about what you just read. When you free yourself from feeling like opening your feed reader, inbox, or bookmarks folder is a chore to plow through, you'll be in a better position to really appreciate what you read.

Photo by artotem.

Step 5: Build a Flow Around Thoughtful Reading

Changing your relationship with the things you read isn't a one-time process. It doesn't require a ton of maintenance, but it does require some vigilance. After all, most of us didn't consciously try to get to the point where we read more than we can absorb or think critically about, so it's easy to slip back into old habits.

Before you add a new site to your feed reader, make sure you ask yourself whether you're reading the site because you really think it's useful and you really want to engage with the author(s) or the community. If you can't honestly say yes, you're probably adding it because you think it's a site you should be reading, which is a no-no. Also, if you do add new sites and feeds to your newsreader or aggregator and find you haven't clicked on them once, haven't read their articles in ages, or don't get anything valuable from them, don't be shy with the axe. Cut them off before they start to nip at the corners of your attention span. Don't lose sight of your goal: to stay free enough to really comprehend and analyze the things you spend your time reading, and to spend your time reading things that enrich your life.

If you start to get overwhelmed, Clay has a number of suggestions on how you can manage the flow of information you consume that are easy to apply and will save you time in the long run.

Photo by aprilzosia.

Extra Credit: Share Your Thoughts, Add Your Own Ideas

All of these steps can help you cut back on the volume of information you consume, target your reading to your interests as opposed to your responsibilities, and use the time you saved to think critically and come up with your own new ideas about the things you've read. The next step is to take those ideas and share them with others, if you see fit. Personally, one of the biggest benefits I derive from managing the flow of information in my life as strictly as I do is that in addition to being exposed to different ideas and having the time to really think them over, I also have the time to come up with my own viewpoints and perspectives and share them with others.

Sharing those ideas with other people does something transformative for your reading comprehension. Instead of simply being a content consumer, absorbing information where you can get it, you become a content creator, offering up your own unique opinions and ideas on a topic for others to read on their own. You're suddenly in the same position as the people you read, wanting people to afford you the same courtesy of reading, thinking, absorbing, and then sharing their own ideas and alternatives (as opposed to rapid-fire reactions) and you're dependant on those people for the same constructive reasoning and passionate engagement as you're now involved in.

Even if you don't decide to add writing to your reading and critical thinking flow, sharing your ideas and thoughts about what you've read with others is a great way to enrich your conversations, learn more about the people in your life, and grow based on their ideas and opinions as well.

Footnote: Don't Hate the Internet, Hate the Game

It would be easy to blame the internet for what appears to be a trend in people with little information and a lot to say, and in fact, some people have tried to claim that it's access to overwhelming amounts of information at our fingertips that's making us less interested in reading and absorbing that information and applying it to our world view. We don't agree, and we don't even think that the volume of information available to us is the problem, either. A lot of people spend time and money to disconnect, retreat to resorts with no internet access and out of cellular range, and escape from their personal fire hoses of information without realizing that they have complete control over the flow of water from that hose at all times.

When I asked Clay Johnson about whether the internet has a role to play here, he pointed to a 2009 study by the University of California San Diego that says we're actually reading three times more every day than we did in 1980, and actually argued that the internet saved reading as we know it. "I think we have to think carefully about this concept that somehow our reading comprehension is actually suffering because of the Internet, because it's fairly clear that we're reading a lot more," he noted. One going theory is that we're trying to do too much at once and it's multi-tasking that's killing our attention spans and ability to absorb what we read. Clay noted that there may be something to that theory, but if it holds water, it's not the internet's fault for presenting us with a lot of data to pay attention to—in reality, it's the way we apply and prioritize that information that needs adjustment, not the source of the information.

If anything, the wealth of information on the internet and the discussion available in all corners on all topics simply brings us face-to-face with something that's been happening for a long time: a lot of people have a lot to say on topics they may not know very much about. The internet just makes us aware of it because it's everywhere and we're engaged in more discussions on more topics than ever before. In a time where there's more information at our fingertips than there ever has been, it's not the internet's fault that most of us have an unhealthy relationship with reading and interacting with the things that we read.

Photo by J Brew.

One of the best things you can do for your reading comprehension and for your own ability to think critically about the world around you is to recognize how valuable you time really is, and spend it reading the things that enrich your life. Take those lessons and topics, and learn to focus on them by looking for more information, building your own ideas off of them, and sharing those ideas with others.

These suggestions will help you get started, and once you start, you'll find that your relationship with reading, both online and offline, is a much more positive, enjoyable one, as opposed to just another thing you have to check off your to-do list.

Clay Johnson is the author of the upcoming book The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption. He graciously offered his help for this story, and we thank him.

Network

2012-01-16T15:20:00.002-05:00

Network from Michael Rigley on Vimeo.

2011 Midyear Game Reviews

2012-01-01T15:08:00.002-05:00

I meant to complete and post these mini-reviews of games released and played during February-June but kept waffling on them. I've yet to coagulate my thoughts on the blockbuster games that got released in the Fall of 2011—Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Gears of War 3, Batman: Arkham City, Uncharted 3, Skyrim, Assassin's Creed: Revelations. As of right now, my thoughts on those games are just huge amounts of squee. And there are some games I've yet to play—Dead Space 2, Mortal Kombat. Onward to the reviews—

Bulletstorm

I picked up two games solely because of the game story’s authors. (Really? Who does that?) Bulletstorm was one of them. Rick Remender has always been a favorite since Fear Agent.

I'm not sure how much an author influences the game (is Marc Laidlaw the only person to have a strong story driven game?) but one can see traces of Remender's style reflected in the story beats and characters. Bulletstorm is an incredibly fun potty mouthed shooter with an irreverent attitude. Space pirates? Resort planet gone to hell? Monsters? Hell yes! Gameplay wise, the conceit is blowing up enemies in various innovative styles to gain points for various advancements. Unfortunately the game suffered from poor sales even with an incentive for early access to the GOW 3 beta on the Xbox version. The story is blockbuster material and of all the games that came out recently, Bulletstorm would have benefited the most from a tie-in book or graphic novel.

Dragon Age 2

For me, Dragon Age 2 (DA2) is the standout RPG of the year (while Skyrim is yet to be released, as of right now it seems like a rehash of the hot mess that was Oblivion¹]. The sequel is head and shoulders above the original. With DA2, Bioware crafted an amazing narrative arc with fleshed out characters and juicy villains while DA1 trotted out the standard fantasy trope of gathering a disparate merry band to overcome a looming evil that threatened to bring catastrophe to the world. Graphically DA2 outdoes the brown sludge of DA1. The dungeons do get recycled but that is a minor annoyance. The romance options are a little slapdash. You can take it or leave it. It is a pity though that you can't continue the relationship with the pirate and simply being nice to Anders results in him moving into your mansion.

Crysis 2

This was the other game that I got because of who had written it. Richard Morgan is one of my favorite sf/fantasy authors whose works are very gritty and dark (the Kovacs series especially are a standout). But this is the only game that I couldn't be bothered to finish because it was a complete bore. Oddly enough they had Peter Watts write the tie-in novel. The comic book tie-in seems to be slightly interesting with Richard Morgan writing it and Peter Bergting's art.

Portal 2

Portal 2 is what video games should be: incredibly clever, polished to a sheen with a slick intuitive design, a fantastic soundtrack and amazing voice acting to go along with characters that have entered gaming lore. The only slight against its perfection is that it runs a bit too short and doesn't offer much replay ability. Portal 2 does add multiplayer this time around but I'm not a fan of MP. Play this game!

L.A. Noire

Pick up your fedora and raincoat. L.A. Noire is a dream come true for anyone who dreamed of being a gumshoe. Players are dropped into a huge and beautifully reproduced 1940s LA sandbox. It bleeds atmosphere. The game is centered around various cases (including the famous Black Dahlia case) of up and coming patrolman Cole Phillips, a recent war veteran with painful memories. While the facial animation is fluid (the game boasts an amazing roster of actors) the characters movements often appear stiff (navigating interrogation can sometimes be tricky with Cole reacting in unexpected ways). Stiff can also be described of Cole Phillips's personality. His fall from grace is cobbled together from the usual noir conventions. I was expecting a bit more Chinatown. A spellbinding but flawed game.

inFamous 2

The inFamous franchise offers an interesting take on superheroes. I wasn't a fan when Sucker Punch announced changes in Cole McGrath. For one, his new voice grated on my nerves and made him sound like a douchebag. Luckily he doesn't talk too much and you don't notice his voice after awhile. inFamous 2 provides a quick update on the current status of Cole based on decisions made in the original game and then immediately jumps into action as the dreaded Beast appears. Cole to his surprise is unable to defeat it and is stripped of his powers. He heads off to New Marais (a stand in for post Katrina New Orleans) for refuge and to regenerate his powers. While Sucker Punch hasn't altered the template too much they have added tweaks and improvements. But the story is lackluster. When sphere afflicted monsters/villains arrive on the scene they do so with a segue that's very nonchalant. As with inFamous 1 moral choices in inFamous 2 remain black and white with a little bit of a twist at the end. I would say this game was "decent".

1 Since writing this, Skyrim has been released and has consumed close to 150 hours of my life. But unsurprisingly it has also come with its own share of problems. I would say Dragon Age 2 and Skyrim are closely tied for top RPG of the year.^↩

Review: The Information Diet A Case for Conscious Consumption

2011-12-30T19:48:00.000-05:00

Infographic by- Shanghai Web Designers

Intertubes¹fire-hose meet brain!

We are, by nature, engines of information processing: devising, decoding and distributing on a consistent and persistent basis. We thrive on information. But our modern existence has given rise to the peculiar conundrum, as the cliche would have it, of being constantly drowning in a deluge of information. Clay Johnson’s² “The Information Diet”³ is a manifesto that is a call to action against uncritical information consumption and replacing it with a mindful and discerning one. Johnson compares our info-gluttony to the sorry state of our current nutrition and its resulting multiple health issues. This analogy isn’t perfect, as our brains are not the same as our guts, but illustrates that whether junk food or junk ideas, both can be bad for one’s health. Because we only have a limited amount of bandwidth to deal with the constant influx of information and with little time given to digest the info-particles hitting our brain, we are easy prey for our cognitive biases. Like junk food our current diet of information is gumming up our mental gears.

Attack email with shurikens!

The least impressive parts of the book were the ones dealing with productivity. Johnson does warn that most “lifehackers”⁴ will find his discussion of productivity methods as remedial (although I’m constantly fighting my RSS feeds). I don’t think there are any productivity gains from reducing your inbox count to shunya⁵. Neither are there any surges from using newfangled tools (gadget lovers usually tend to love the new shiny more than actually using it). The only way forward is by changing foundational elements such as rethinking our affair with email⁶.

Toss the lifesaver!

Do we think about the value of information? What each and every byte represents? While not prescriptive Johnson provides guidelines on how we can improve our information diet: limit intake, go to the source, seek balance, keep it local, produce rather than simply consume are some of the important ones⁶. “Information flow allows a state of the source to reduce uncertainty in state of the receiver”⁷. Because of the heavily massaged nature of information and due to our “filter bubble”⁸, our world views often become calcified. I used to think "informational illiteracy" could be combated by wider exposure to the world. But as Johnson states there are vast information storehouses available for anyone to access yet people still hold on to fallacies or false premises. Which is why I think we need more information curators. Curators recognize overarching themes and can pull in disparate sources⁹.

Fight the malaise!

I think the most vital part of Clay's manifesto for the information diet is in exhorting for the creation of a well informed citizenry¹⁰. Especially in a representative democracy where the levers of the government are far removed from the ordinary citizen. The distance between policy creation and citizen involvement is increasing. Critical thinking skills and statistical literacy are crucial to participating in a society where complex policy decisions, that directly effect the day-to-day lives of average people, are being made and contested . The Athenian democracy was contemptuous of anyone not participating in the political process. We get the word 'idiot' from "the ancient Greek word ἰδιώτης (idiōtēs), meaning a private person, a person who is not actively interested in politics"¹¹. We cannot afford to be idiots in the Grand Experiment. Take charge of your information diet!

1 http://www.informationdiet.com/^↩

2 http://amzn.to/vWWtIe^↩

3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_hack^↩

4 The History of Zero: How from shunya, the Sanskrit word meaning nothingness, grew a numeral that changed the world. http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/about/ideas.jsp^↩

5 http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2011/12/23/144200222/work-life-balance-vw-agrees-to-switch-off-after-hours-email^↩

6 http://www.quora.com/Does-going-on-an-information-diet-improve-ones-productivity/answer/Clay-Johnson^↩

7 Barnes, B., & Dupré, J. (2008). Genomes and what to make of them. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.^↩

8 http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles.html^↩

9 One of the best curated sites: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/about/^↩

10 http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2011/dec/22/fact-checking-echo-chamber-nation/^↩

11 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athenian_democracy^↩

HackCollege Infographic: Get More Out Of Google

2011-12-26T22:21:00.000-05:00

Created by: HackCollege

Jack Vettriano

2010-04-08T13:12:00.001-04:00

Retro Sounds

2010-03-06T01:13:00.001-05:00

While I was in India last year, I picked up a MP3 CD of Top of the Charts from 1978. Pretty fun to look at what was getting the most airtime when I was born. It appears that these aren’t US toppers but rather European ones. No artists are listed but only the tracks. I guess the assumption was that the tracks were classic enough to be recognized as a particular artist’s. I have added the artist names in brackets.

Onwards with the campy pomp and excess of the 70’s…

1. We Are The Champions [Queen]

2. Come Together [This is the Aerosmith version from Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band]

3. Rockin’ All Over The World [Status Quo]

4. We Will Rock You [Queen]

5. Y.M.C.A. [Village People]

6. Love Is In The Air [John Paul Young]

7. Brown Girl In The Ring [Boney M.]

8. Night Fever [Bee Gees]

9. Is This Love [Bob Marley]

10. I’m Every Woman [Chaka Khan]

11. If I Can’t Have You [Yvonne Elliman]

12. No Woman No Cry [Bob Marley]

13. Grease [Frankie Valli]

14. Rasputin [Boney M.]

15. Baker Street [Gerry Rafferty]

16. One Nation Under A Groove [Funkadelic]

17. Substitute [Clout]

18. Because The Night [Patti Smith]

19. Dust In The Wind [Kansas] (Bonus: Beaker version)

20. Wuthering Heights [Kate Bush]

21. Mexican Girl [Smokie]

22. Three Times A Lady [Commodores]

23. Sometimes When We Touch [Dan Hill]

24. She’s Always A Woman [Billy Joel]

25. Wonderful Tonight [Eric Clapton]

Image created using Paint.NET

Testing Out The MarsEdit Beta

2010-02-15T13:51:00.001-05:00

(Image copyright: Gaspar Noé, Enter the Void)

This is a quick and dirty post using the new MarsEdit beta.

Still feeling my way around this program. I hope I installed it correctly. Unarchived the zip folder. Replaced previous version with the beta version in my application folder. The "About" says 3.0b7. I'm still not happy with the image handling. Other than plopping the image/picture/photo on the page, I can't do anything else with it. Not even basic re-sizing. Previously, adding images/photos/videos using MarsEdit have ended up the final post running out of bounds.

Preview not updating as images/paragraphs are added.

Edit: Image re-sized in Windows Live Writer

Dancing in the Streets

2010-01-24T15:36:00.001-05:00

Marc Webb has been hired to helm the Spiderman franchise.

Remember emo Peter Parker’s dance scene in Spiderman 3?

~~http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLqsdPUfnno~~ YouTube link dead

I guess we’re going to see more dancing in Spidey 4.

~~http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2seAJsrtIbQ~~ YouTube link dead

It could be worse...much much worse

Update 12/31/2011: Removed dead YouTube links and replaced with gifs and jpeg. I've left the Dariya Dil video up as that dance is gold. And despite what I thought about the new Spiderman reboot, from what I have seen, it looks pretty good.

Droid Dazzle

2010-01-02T23:43:00.001-05:00

Taken with my Droid 5M camera at Cafe Gutenberg. Uploaded to Picasa and then downloaded to PC. Additional alterations done in Windows Live Writer. Art by Matthew Damian Ritchie.

The picture isn’t quite sharp as I shot it on default settings with yellow lighting.

2010: Beginnings and Endings

2010-01-01T21:45:00.001-05:00

Jan 1 2010: The herald of the end of the decade. (Or was that 2009?). No matter what gets decided, ‘10 makes a nice bookend for the beginning and ending of the 00’s (no one has come with a decent name for this decade. The “Naughty Aughties”? Really?)

Nine years already? For me, 2000 is hardly a distant memory. Wasn't it like yesterday?

Time perception is altering. We are strapped onto an increasingly accelerating, stomach churning roller-coaster where the usual markers of years/decades/centuries are irrelevant. The arrow of time’s straight flight will cease to exist becoming a blur...an information smear across the universe…ever expanding…

…which makes it a perfect opportunity to make every day an epoch.

Greetings from the River City

2010-01-01T21:33:00.001-05:00

Contemplating doing a photo-a-day.

Manga Jackpot

2009-11-29T12:31:00.002-05:00

Edited: Tuesday Dec 29 2009

Suvudu is currently running a 365 Days of Manga sweepstakes. The host of the sweepstakes is Jason Thompson.

I was lucky to bag a win! And there's a bonus win round for sending in pictures of self with the manga loot.

The manga is CLAMP's xxxHOLIC.
I have never been much of a fan of CLAMP's art style. xxxHOLIC makes for a decent but ultimately unsatisfying read.

And my mug gets to be on Suvudu.

Bonus Manga

Paul Krugman = Hari Seldon*?

2009-04-15T20:00:00.001-04:00

The Foundation series has always been near and dear to me as they were the first science fiction books I read and this tidbit in a recent Newsweek article on Paul Krugman was geekgasmic .

Krugman says he found himself in the science fiction of Isaac Asimov, especially the "Foundation" series—"It was nerds saving civilization, quants who had a theory of society, people writing equations on a blackboard, saying, 'See, unless you follow this formula, the empire will fail and be followed by a thousand years of barbarism'." ...Social science, he says, offered the promise of what he dreamed of in science fiction—"the beauty of pushing a button to solve problems. Sometimes there really are simple solutions: you really can have a grand idea."

The man has the sci-fi cred: The Theory of Interstellar Trade. Maybe he should seriously consider dipping into speculative fiction.

*Hari Seldon is a character in Isaac Asimov's Foundation Series and develops psychohistory which combines history, sociology, and mathematical statistics to make (nearly) exact predictions of the collective actions of very large groups of people, such as the Galactic Empire.

Kindle Notes

2009-04-15T19:48:00.001-04:00

The Kindle Revolution: Digital readers will save writers and publishing, even if they destroy the book business by Marion Maneker

The Kindle may be little more than a novelty device today. With each passing day, though, it begins to have the potential to change the business model for writers of all types and stripes. The book business is a distribution business, pure and simple. It's about getting the words and ideas of a writer into the hands of a reader.
The important thing here is to recognize that the purchasing decision for a book doesn't take place in the bookstore anymore. You don't need to hold the book, read the flap copy, or weigh the sincerity of the jacket blurbs anymore.
Here's where the Kindle comes in. The collapse of bookstores almost ensures that the Kindle will thrive. Not because it's better than a book; that doesn't matter. The nation-within-a-nation that reads for pleasure and to be informed is a small but vibrant republic. Heavy readers make up a large portion of the book-buying public. These are people who read two to three books a week and buy 50 or so books a year. The Kindle will solve a number of problems for the citizens of Biblandia, not the least of which is having to go find a bookstore to get their next read.

The Amazon Kindle is the Great White Hope for Monetizing Print Media by Steve Rubel

The Kindle, like the iPod, is an emerging critical mass device that actually encourages people to pay for content rather than get it for free.

Don’t Write Off Ereaders Just Yet by By Michael Bhaskar

...far from reading devices going away, they are now on an unstoppable trajectory: investment, diversification, rapid innovation, everything is there.
For reading devices to break out into the mainstream, to force their way back into the conversation, they have to become wildly desirably and also achieved a heightened simplicity. This might be summarized by saying people need to want them, and then need to be able to use them to a degree that has hitherto not been the case. I want / I can.
Usability and covetability. Two principles for world domination.

How the Kindle will change the world by Jacob Weisberg

...why should a civilization that reads electronically be any less literate than one that harvests trees to do so? And why should a transition away from the printed page lessen our appreciation and love for printed books? Hardbacks these days are disposable vessels, printed on ever crappier paper with bindings that skew and crack. In a world where we do most of our serious reading on screens, books may again thrive as expressions of craft and design. Their decline as useful objects may allow them to flourish as design objects.

File under LOST: Awesome Vintage DHARMA Ads

2009-04-05T21:34:00.001-04:00

Smoke 'em if you got 'em., originally uploaded by Hot Meteor.

E Ink

2009-04-03T19:07:00.001-04:00

Insightful interview by Xconomy with Russ Wilcox, co-founder and CEO of E Ink, the Cambridge, MA company behind the low-power, high-contrast "electronic paper" screen.

Excerpt:

...the company spent six years getting the technology to the point where Sony could use it in the world’s first e-paper-based e-book reader, the Librié, introduced in 2004. And it’s taken another five years for Sony, Amazon, and their competitors to create e-publishing ecosystems that consumers are interested in inhabiting (meaning not just the devices, but the content available for them and the mechanisms for purchasing, storing, searching, and annotating that content). ...It’s a very complex system design that combines chemistry, material science, electronics, optics, and mechanical engineering. It’s not trivial to put together, which is why it’s taken 12 years and $150 million.
if you want to buy a development kit and design your own device, it’s $3,000. With the development kit, you get everything that’s inside an e-book, including a little chip that runs Linux and a bunch of open source drivers, a touch screen with pen input, and the Broadsheet chip.
Worldwide, the book industry is an $80 billion industry. If, by distributing electronically, they could save 30 percent on their costs, that would add $25 billion a year to their profitability. The newspaper industry is twice as large, and could probably save 50 percent. What we’ve got here is a technology that could be saving the world $80 billion a year.

Designing for the Kindle

2009-03-28T18:56:00.001-04:00

Jakob Nielsen, the guru of usability, has a pertinent article on designing content for the Kindle. He exhorts,

Writing for Kindle is like writing for print, the Web, and mobile devices combined; optimal usability means optimizing content for each platform's special characteristics….For Kindle, it's certainly unacceptable to simply repurpose print content. But you can't repurpose website content, either. For good Kindle usability, you have to design for the Kindle. Write Kindle-specific headlines and create Kindle-specific article structures.

The Kindle is fantastic for displaying static pure linear text which is most fiction and non fiction. For the web, magazines, newspapers it doesn’t do so well.

I wonder how House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski would turn out on the Kindle?

And an article on Time about the K2.

COBRA Health Insurance!

2009-03-21T22:09:00.001-04:00

~~Lost photo of COBRA coverage letter~~

You’d think that they would have chosen a better name. No, that’s not a letter from the offices of G.I. Joe’s arch enemy. That would COBRA as in Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (COBRA) that provides continuation of group health coverage that otherwise might be terminated in case of a layoff or other qualifying events. The name is appropriate though as the coverage rates sting.

Books & Bling

2009-03-21T21:56:00.002-04:00

~~Lost photo of book loot~~

I made out like a bandit at the Creatures ‘n Crooks Bookshoppe Books & Bling on Jan 31!

View Larger Map

Photo album courtesy of Roy.

I won one of the grand prizes: The Beyond This World basket. Thank you Lelia and J.B. Stanley.

What was in the basket?

Portraits of His Children, The Voyaging, Inside Straight, and Nightflyers by George R. R. Martin

Prints and Original Drawings by fantasy artist Bonnie Watson

L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future Vol. XXII and Twilight of the Fifth Sun by David Sakmyster

The Moon and the Sun (unsigned hardcover) by Vonda N. McIntyre and A Winter Solstice Ritual from the Pacific Northwest, signed by Vonda & Ursula K. Le Guin

Listening at the Gate by Betsy James

End of Days, The Fourth World, Time and Time Again, The Watch by Dennis Danvers

Travelers by Nash Black

Talking to Trees by Kathryn Sullivan

In other news March is Love-your-indie-bookstore month and Joe Hill is running a special contest. Not many days left though.

Review: Patient Zero

2009-03-21T17:03:00.001-04:00

(This is a review of the ARC received through Early Reviewers on LibraryThing.)

"Now...let's go kick some undead ass."

That about sums up Patient Zero, in which Joe Ledger, tough cop, is recruited by a top secret government agency, Department of Military Sciences (DMS), to stop the zombie plague. Primarily a thriller with a thin veneer of science Maberry handles the problem of a biological attack by terrorists with some ingenuity; use human vectors and infect them with a disease that transforms them into a bundle of primal urges. The blurbs tout Patient Zero as a mix of Max Brooks and James Rollins. While I'm doubtful of the first reference, unless the common denominator of zombies counts, I can see from the Wikipedia entry on Rollins how DMS is similar to the SIGMA Force of Rollins.

The ass kicking is enjoyable to a degree but Maberry rides the cliché train with all the requisite stops: the unstoppable superhero (and as mentioned in the book our hero does share his name with a certain Marvel character) with a conscience, his testosterone leaking merry band of team members, the tough as nails on the outside but soft as a cookie dough inside token foreign accented (in this case British) female character with the sordid past who falls for the hero's hard edged sapphire blue eyes, the all powerful stoic leader of the organization who has an incredibly powerful data mining software, reptilian villains and a traitorous viper are the scenic highlights.

Joe Ledger is someone I would certainly I would want on my team if and when the zombie uprising takes place but I found myself rooting for the geeky scientist with the gallows humor. Except everyone in the book wanted to punch him. As Charlie Stross says, "You need a topping of gallows humour just to keep it in perspective: humour is a brutal necessity when you're confronting the horrific on a day to day basis (as anyone who hangs out with medics can probably attest)."

Maberry certainly knows his jujitsu albeit it is a little hard to visualize the moves. Of the four major action setups two, the meatpacking plant and the crab plant, are outstandingly good. I did expect a little more splatter and a little less Hoo-Ah. The twists in the book are somewhat predictable. It appears that this is the first book of a series and hopefully it gets hairier as it grows.

A spoiler free taste of his action can be found here.

The Kindle Rave

2009-03-21T16:53:00.001-04:00

I recently purchased the Kindle 2 (K2) and got it on Friday February 27 2009 (3 days after the launch). Techlust drove me to the open arms of Amazon’s latest generation of the reading device. The look, feel and packaging of the device are very Cupertino. Nothing like the marching to its own drumbeats aesthetics of the Kindle 1. I suggest getting the Kindle cover which sells separately.

The K2 obviously comes with a “better and faster on a smaller form factor” sticker. When I first saw the dimensions of the display after unpacking, I thought it was too small but reading on it is...dare I say it… perfect (as in it does very well what it is supposed to do). The paper like e ink technology creates no eye strain and the device truly "disappears" while reading. Text size can be altered on the fly and “locations” instead of page numbers make it easier to keep track of where you are in a book. The screen size of the K2 would not work for textbooks, research papers and technical publications. I’m sure future versions will see an upgrade. Competition is coming.

The button placement is unobtrusive although I would have preferred a larger previous page button on the left hand side (I’m assuming having the large next page button on both sides is for both righties and lefties). The 5-way “clit” (or klit) controller works well but it can be a little bit tiring to move the cursor around. The keypad buttons look fragile and I doubt they could sustain continuous typing (people who both text on their cell and own a Kindle might have something to say). The dictionary, annotations and highlighting functions are great. It’s annoying to not be able to edit the Clippings in the Kindle itself.

Experimental features include PDF support (sketchy having to send the file to Amazon servers for “conversion” and it just plain out sucks. I hope Amazon quickly updates their PDF support software), playing music and audio books (it’s great but no way of knowing which track is playing. Will it be tied to the Amazon music store?), text-read (eh. Stupid ruckus created over nothing) and a basic web browser (does only text. Easy way to check blogs without subscribing. What hidden fees might be charged though? Only Kindle store access is free).

Amazon’s wireless “Whispernet” is instantaneous gratification. Walk into a bookstore > browse through the latest hardcovers (most of which go for $25.00 or more and maybe less after store discounts) > whip out the Kindle > connect > browse the Amazon Kindle store with access to more than 250,000 books (and increasing everyday) > download the books on the Kindle immediately for $9.99 a pop > start reading. It also magically updates the K2 with the latest issues of newspapers, magazines and blogs that one subscribes to. I downloaded some books from the Amazon store and quite a few freebies from Mobileread.com and Baen. Purchases include: UR (written just for the Kindle) by Stephen King, The Dreaming Void by Peter F. Hamilton, Fiasco by Thomas E. Ricks, Gamble by Thomas Ricks, Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky, subscriptions to The Atlantic, Analog and Asimov magazines. Great free way to get my fix of news is to use kindlefeeder.com.

Because of my recent layoff I had decided to move to cheaper lodgings. As a result I had to cart my 300 or so books to storage and books are heavy! Had it all been on a Kindle it would have been pick and up and go as well as instantaneous access. I’m a bibliophile but I’m starting to think some of my paper books are clutter.

With the K2 I have no future regret. I'm excited about it and being involved in its future iterations.

Is the Kindle for everyone? Probably not. It's great for people on the go and who read a lot. The price tag may not make it immediately ubiquitous.

Will it replace paper books? Probably not. The Kindle does fit a niche and it's perfect addition/complement for who anyone who loves to read.

Snow

2009-03-21T15:43:00.001-04:00

Church Hill Snow Night 03/01/2009.

Hooray! Richmond finally got a snow year! Beautiful, powdery, angel white snow. The kind winter wonderlands are made of. The last time I remember actual snow sticking around in Richmond is December 2004.

The physics of snow crystals by Kenneth G Libbrecht who has a great website on snow crystals.

Gloomy

2009-03-18T22:51:00.001-04:00

~~Lost photo~~

The view outside the window of my old apartment about a month back.

Update 12/31/2011: Replaced with this

What SFBC is good for

2009-01-14T22:35:00.001-05:00

Ginormous OMNIBUS editions.

Brent Weeks Night Angel Trilogy.

Now if they only started putting out more original material, getting their editors back and worked on their blog.

I’ve enjoyed their anniversary editions but that seems to have stopped.

Review: The Domino Men

2009-01-14T19:33:00.001-05:00

(The editors over at EOS were kind enough to send me a early readers copy of this book.)

Jonathan Barnes's The Domino Men defies easy description. It is a mish-mash of styles; it could be a quirky phantasmagoria, or a horror-comedy of Lovecraftian proportions. I haven't read Barnes's The Somnambulist (although I ordered it about 30 pages into The Domino Men), but apparently The Domino Men (while not being a direct sequel) is set in the same alter-earth universe. Presented as the memoirs of one Henry Lamb, filing clerk and former child star, The Domino Men recounts his harrowing experiences after being conscripted into a civil war between the mysterious Directorate and the House of Windsor (that would be the British Royal family) over the very soul of London.

Weird enough?

If that sounds like your cup of tea, chief, you are in for a treat as it gets even weirder.

Barnes is a terrific prose stylist and displays sly wit in his turns of phrase. The book moves at a fast clip and I gobbled it up in a day and half. Maybe it was because I started reading the book at a local café ensconced with a coffee while it poured outside under a yellow pall cast by the streetlights; the book has that kind of moodiness.

It might be too early but I would say The Domino Men is one of the best books of the year!

Trust the Process.

The Domino Men comes out January 27 2009.

LOST

2009-01-14T19:32:00.001-05:00

Having somewhat recently finished watching Season 4, I have to say LOST has to be one of the best genre bending shows. I cannot wait till the new season starts (Jan 21st 2009). At best, it could be described as an island sized riddle wrapped in a mystery smoke inside an enigmatic organization. Perhaps the only other show that had me as devoted as LOST was X-Files (before aliens and corn syrup colluded).

LOST is a very demanding show and it is absolutely essential to watch the show in order right from the pilot (to say nothing of the flashbacks and flashforwards). I consumed LOST in seasonal gulps rather than weekly bites which I think makes one appreciate LOST’s narrative. The writers do an amazing job of starting story threads seasons back and wrapping it with sweet payoffs (Ben’s lost kidney anyone?).

I have no theories of what could be at the heart of the LOST mystery but after watching each episode I would head over to The LOST blog at filmfodder.com for some great show recaps and discussions (especially things I might have missed).

And for even more deeper meaning I enjoyed J. Wood’s Living Lost: Why We're All Stuck on the Island. The book covered only up to Season 2 and Wood did some entertaining blog posts on Powell’s Books. I’m hoping he picks it up again.

No matter how LOST ends I have enjoyed the ride. And yes, the journey is more important than the destination. At least, most of the time.

LOST Image Design Copyright

Remove My Heart

2009-01-06T22:37:00.001-05:00

One of my favorite photos.

Libraries

2009-01-06T21:57:00.001-05:00

Two libraries.

Jay Walker’s library is amazing. Vision of heaven?

The organizing principle is one I whole heartedly agree with.

Walker shuns the sort of bibliomania that covets first editions for their own sake—many of the volumes that decorate the library's walls are leather-bound Franklin Press reprints. What gets him excited are things that changed the way people think, like Robert Hooke's Micrographia. Published in 1665, it was the first book to contain illustrations made possible by the microscope. He's also drawn to objects that embody a revelatory (or just plain weird) train of thought. "I get offered things that collectors don't," he says. "Nobody else would want a book on dwarfs, with pages beautifully hand-painted in silver and gold, but for me that makes perfect sense."
What excites him even more is using his treasures to make mind-expanding connections. He loves juxtapositions, like placing a 16th-century map that combines experience and guesswork—"the first one showing North and South America," he says—next to a modern map carried by astronauts to the moon. "If this is what can happen in 500 years, nothing is impossible."

Here's Jay's show-and-tell about his Library of Human Imagination.

And Hitler’s Forgotten Library...The surviving—and largely ignored—remnants of Adolf Hitler's personal library.

Review: The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less

2009-01-06T20:52:00.002-05:00

This is a lazy review.

Trent of The Simple Dollar does a good job of reviewing the book here.

Two illuminating talks by Barry Schwartz.

I'm going to lift what The Paradox of Choice is all about from the book itself because Barry does a good job of summarizing it.

The value of autonomy is built into the fabric of our legal and moral system. Autonomy is what gives us the license to hold one another morally (and legally) responsible for one's actions. It's the reason we praise individuals for their achievements and also blame them for their failures. There's not a single aspect of our collective social life that would be recognizable if we abandoned our commitment to autonomy.
Choices have a psychological value by lending control over situations.
As the number of available choices increases, the autonomy, control, and liberation this variety brings are powerful and positive.
But as the number of choices keeps growing, negative aspects of having a multitude of options begin to appear. As the number of choices grows further, the negatives escalate until we become overloaded. At this point, choice no longer liberates, but debilitates and might even said to tyrannize.

The book has four parts.

Part I shows how Our current range of choices have increased tremendously.
Part II explains How we choose and shows how difficult and demanding it is to make choices. Falling into the trap of maximizing.
Part III details How and why choice makes us suffer.
Part IV gives Recommendations to make positive choices and avoid negative ones.
which would be
We would be better off if we embraced certain voluntary constraints on our freedom of choice, instead of rebelling against them.
We would be better off seeking what was "good enough" instead of seeking the best.
We would be better off if we lowered our expectations about the results of decisions.
We would be better off if the decisions we made were non-reversible.
We would be better off if we paid less attention to what others around us were doing.

That's about it.

Review: Replay

2009-01-03T14:27:00.001-05:00

It's the ultimate fantasy: What if you could rewind your life and start living your life again? What would you change? Could you change? Or do we have a manifest destiny?

Jeff Winston gets to play out that wish fulfillment when after having a heart attack in 1988 his consciousness travels back in time to 1963. He is eighteen years old again and his memories of his life are intact. Initially dazed and confused, he seizes the opportunity to make the wrongs of his life right. But at age 43 he dies again…and goes back in time. After another replay Jeff cannot stop his inevitable death. He become dejected and depressed until Starsea happens. Starsea? You'll have to read the book to find out!

The questions raised in the book reminded me of Eternal return and Nietzsche's Theory of Eternal Recurrence. Replay is compared to Jack Finney's (of Body Snatchers fame) Time and Time Again. But Replay isn't really science fiction or fantasy. While his characters speculate on why the replay is happening, Grimwood doesn't offer any explanations. And an intricate howdunit would have bogged down a good story. Replay more--a poignant love story, a story about the human condition, our relation to time and above all about hope and living the present to the maximum.

This book is a must read and it's great that its back in print!

New Term For The Month

2008-12-22T01:32:00.001-05:00

Sprezzatura.

From wikipedia,

Sprezzatura is defined as “a certain nonchalance, so as to conceal all art and make whatever one does or says appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it.” Sprezzatura has also been described “as a form of defensive irony: the ability to disguise what one really desires, feels, thinks, and means or intends behind a mask of apparent reticence and nonchalance.”

My Signal Pattern

2008-12-21T20:08:00.001-05:00

What's yours?

Review: Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions

2008-10-17T07:16:00.001-04:00

It's the perennial question “What makes people tick?”

In Predictably/Irrational, Dan Ariely offers a breezy, engaging introduction (the book averages about 18 pages per chapter) to his research on consumer behavior and the behavioral sciences. Ariely also speculates on how this research applies to our day-to-day activities. Behavioral economics (a mixture of economics and psychology) or the science of judgment and decision making (JDM) is all about answering that question of how we go about making decisions. The traditional rational view of human nature assumes a decision tree where individuals choose the best action according to stable preference functions and constraints facing them. This view is the basis of almost all of the economic models/policies such as health care, education, retirement funds etc. P/I supports the polar opposite view that our decisions are inherently irrational i.e. that they deviate from the ideal norm set forth by rationality. More interestingly, we are not only irrational but we are predictably irrational or certain mistakes are systematic and therefore can be avoided (Daniel Gilbert in his books Stumbling on Happiness says, “The mistakes we make when we try to imagine our personal futures are also lawful, regular, and systematic. They too have a pattern that tells us about the powers and limits of foresight in much the same way that optical illusions tell us about the powers and limits of eyesight.”).

P/I isn't simply a collection of anecdotal evidence or intuitions but a journey of investigation of how we deviate from the norm of rationality as well as setting forth ideas why we do so. Ariely recounts the numerous experiments he carried out in his empirical endeavor of documenting human irrationality. He makes us think about ourselves and suggests how we can limit the mistakes we make and optimally solve our problems.

What are the different aspects of our irrationality? The following are the condensed chapters with some additional resources by me.

It's a ubiquitous feature of human nature to compare and contrast everything. The Ebbinghaus Illusion illustrates this visually. Additionally, we compare things that are easily comparable and avoid things that cannot be easily compared. So in every decision we make whether it's buying a house, picking a date or paying CEO's, we can be fooled by decoys. The constant comparison can lead to more we have the more we desire. How to break the cycle of relativity? One is to reduce to smaller circles or as Barry Schwartz says in The Paradox of Choice, “Choose the Right Pond: If there were only one pond - if everyone compared his position to the positions of everybody else - virtually all of us would be losers. After all, in the pond containing whales, even sharks are small. So instead of comparing ourselves to everyone, we try to mark off the world in such a way that in our pond, in comparison with our reference pond, we are successful.” Two is to increase focus from narrow to broad. Don't make a local decision choice but instead apply it universally.

Consumer spending accounts for more than two-thirds of U.S. economic activity. How do we make sure we are making the right decisions? Encountering a new product that we would like to buy, the first price becomes an anchor and an imprint sets in. Since there are no absolutes any particular item will always be at the mercy of the context in which it found. Therefore, we should question our repeated decisions. Did they arrive from our fundamental likes and dislikes? Probably not. They arose from imprinting, anchors, arbitrary coherence (initial prices are arbitrary but once established are coherent or consistent over a range of similar products) and herding (the assumption of something being good or bad based on other people's and often our own previous behavior). Those lost to memory first decisions leads to a long stream of similar decisions. By this questioning we can understand our vulnerabilities and can act on them. The basic economic model of supply and demand is used to illustrate how the equilibrium price and quantity of a good or a service are determined by the interaction of sellers (supply) and buyers (demand) in a market. But it's shown that customer behavior can be manipulated. We don't have a good handle on our own preferences and the prices we are willing to pay for different goods and experiences. Supply and demand aren't two independent forces but are intertwined. Furthermore they are based on memory of the customers and not on preferences. The underlying assumption of free trade and free market is that the true value of everything is known i.e. there exists perfect information, when in fact this far from the truth. Supply and demand cannot setup the optimal market price and free market cannot maximize the utility, especially society's essentials. Therefore an entity such as the government is required to bring in some regulation even at the expense of a modicum of free enterprise.

Free! is an emotional hot button and often blinds people. Chris Anderson says “The standard idea of free is based on cross-subsidies - the shifting of costs from one product to another. In any package of products and services, from banking to mobile calling plans, the price of each individual component is often determined by psychology not cost. Your cell phone company may not make money on your monthly minutes - it keeps that fee low because it knows that it's the first thing you look at when picking carrier - but your monthly voicemail fee is pure profit...In “freeconomics” ...there is a huge difference between cheap and free. Give a product away and it can go viral. Charge a single cent for it and you're in an entirely different business, one of clawing and scratching for every customer. The psychology of "free" is powerful indeed...”. Ariely argues that the idea of free can be used to drive some aspects of social policy.

Our lives are guided by social norms and market norms. Social norms are basically good human to human interaction while market norms are based on monetary norms (but also include industry, self-reliance and inventiveness). Mixing the two often backfires.

We are not fully integrated human beings but a multiplicity of selves and surprise, surprise our emotional states have a huge influence on our decision making capabilities. We often make our decisions in a cold emotional state but once in a state of arousal we find ourselves easily waylaying it.

Hofstadter's rule says, “Everything takes longer than you expect, even when you take Hofstadter's rule into account”. The struggle for control is all round us. Resisting temptation and instilling self-control are general human goals and repeatedly failing to achieve them is a source of much of our misery. Fleeting impulses with the promise of instant gratification detract us from our long term goals. Not everyone understands their tendency to procrastinate, and even those who do recognize their tendency to procrastinate may not understand their problem completely. They may set deadlines but not necessarily the deadlines for getting the best performance. A dictatorial command is the most effective but not highly desirable or feasible. Although almost everyone has problems with procrastination, those who recognize and admit their weakness are in a better position to utilize available tools for precommitment and by doing so, help themselves overcome it. "Choice architecture" can be used to solve our health problems and declining savings rate.

Ownership pervades our lives and shapes most of what we do. Much of our life story can be told by describing the ebb and flow of our particular possessions - what we get and what we give up. We buy and sell clothes, food, automobiles and homes and in the course of our career our time. It's not easy to make good decisions about the utility of what we own because of the quirks of human nature. One, we love what we have. Two, we focus on the loss of things rather than on what we may gain. Thirdly, we assume the other party sees the transaction from our viewpoint. Ownership also includes the “IKEA effect” i.e. the work invested into an object. Also because of virtual ownership we start that to feel that we own the object before we even possess it. This endowment effect is put to great advantage by the advertising industry. It's not just objects that have ownership, its ideas and points of view too. While ownership is tied into our lives the only cure is to step back and look at transaction with the disinterested eye.

We love to keep our options open and in the process we give up something as well. The dizzying array of choices and having to live to this fantasy of being able to do everything becomes detrimental to our psychological and emotional well being. An example of choice paralysis is Buridan's ass.

Which type of input is important -- knowledge before the experience, or an input of information after the experience has taken place. Pre-knowledge can greatly shape the sensory experience, affect the physiology our experience and not just inform us. Expectations shape stereotypes. A stereotype after all is a way of categorizing information in the hope of predicting experiences, shortcuts to make sense of complicated surroundings. Expectations can profoundly affect us by altering our subjective and even objective experiences as evidenced by the placebo effect. Two mechanisms shape the expectations that make placebos work - belief and conditioning. This has implications for health care. What's the effect of pricey medicine? Are drugs like any other product? Do high prices mean higher quality and do our expectations translate into the objective efficacy of the product? We have to rationally think about the product and the price and break free of the irrational cycle. We have to increase the burden of proof for medical procedures.

People will cheat given a chance. Honesty is the best policy and the platform for all transactions. There is huge blindness in human nature: When the medium is non-monetary the chances of dishonesty increases. Case in point: The current financial crisis.

In conclusion, Ariely presents one final behavioral characteristic of people: The need for uniqueness or in some cultures the need for belonging. This need being so paramount that we often sacrifice personal pleasure to project a certain image (see also The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less by Barry Schwartz,“Even decisions as trivial as renting a video became important if we believe that these decisions are revealing something significant about ourselves.”).

So what does behavioral economics offer us? Standard economics assumes that we are rational -- that we know all the pertinent information about our decisions, that we can calculate the value of the different options we face, and that we are cognitively unhindered in weighting the ramifications of each potential choice. The result is that that we are presumed to be making logical and sensible decisions. And even if we make wrong decisions from time to time, the standard economics perspective suggests we will quickly learn from our mistakes either on our own or with the help of “market forces”. The basis of behavioral economics based on the quite intuitive idea that people do not always behave rationally and that they often make mistakes in their decisions. These deficiencies in human nature offer opportunities for free lunches i.e. chances to improve. Under standard assumptions everyone in the market place is trying to maximize profit and striving to optimize his experiences. Every opportunity would have been found and utilized to the maximum profit. There would be no free lunches. From the point of behavioral economics there are opportunities to make better decisions and therefore free lunches. It lies in new methods, mechanisms and other interventions that would help people achieve more of what they truly want.

New Term For The Month

2008-10-16T09:50:00.000-04:00

Manichaean Paranoia.

From wikipedia,

Manichaean paranoia is the moral certitude that one is leading the forces of good against the empire of evil. It is the idea that one's moral superiority justifies one in committing immoral acts. Because one perpetrates these acts on 'immoral' people, one is not morally responsible for the means used, only the ends achieved.

Review: The Andromeda Strain

2008-10-16T08:14:00.001-04:00

(This is a review of the 2008 TV movie.)

Seemingly creativity has run barren and the only fall back are remakes of classics. The first thing that pops into one's head after watching The Andromeda Strain is why did they even bother making this? The only update that this remake offers is in effects (and not even creative ones at that), a broader character diversity (blacks and gays) and introducing some really unwanted changes to the story (nanotechnology, black holes and time travel? seriously?).

Ridley Scott, the craftsman behind Alien and Blade Runner was the producer of the remake. How could they have gone so wrong? Advertised as a television summer blockbuster event, it's a showpiece of wretched dialogue and bad science. The schlocky script makes random leaps, careens into illogical blind alleys and disregards the basic structure, style and principles of plotting with abandon. The makers would have had better luck having the sophisticated A.I. of the Wildfire center write the script. Excusing it as a simple fun switch-your-brains-off entertainment would be ignoring the story's background. We shouldn't have to endure passable television. Crichton's novel was a howdunit techno thriller, recounting in a very detached style to maintain that sense of a real five-day major biological crisis. Since the novel's publication in the 70's, numerous books have updated and re-envisioned the exo-biological and biowarfare scenarios.

Robert Wise’s 1971 film is superior to this remake in every way. Shot in a documentary flavor (watch the Making of the film), it conveys a sense of quiet dread and the scientists frustration convincingly. Instead in this update, what should have been a taut story about scientists trapped in an Erlenmeyer flask of tension trying to solve a unique and deadly scientific puzzle turns out to be an over baked X-Files episode. Charred human remains, a chainsaw decapitation and a severed thumb do not make a well told story. They betray its SciFi channel origins. The truth is real biological attack scenarios aren't really sexy. Cue the clichéd government and military conspiracies, the clichéd good looking "scientists", the clichéd jargon, the clichéd journalist hunting for the truth. All to supposedly amp up the tension.

Hopefully with the drubbing that A&E is going to get over this the networks steer away from future ridiculous remakes. But who are we kidding? It's already nominated for a Primetime Emmy.

Why is my blog named Out of Control Action Plan?

2008-10-15T19:19:00.001-04:00

Because The Girls Rebel Force of Competitive Swimmers was taken.

Later on what’s an Out of Control Action Plan. Because everybody needs one like a chicken needs its feathers.

Death of Reading

2008-10-15T09:02:00.010-04:00

Every year a particular hobbyhorse is trotted out: Reading is dying and there are less and less readers. It's time to realize that this horse has pretty much been beaten to death. There have been no convincing statistics to show that reading is declining. A lot depends on exactly what one is reading. There is very little social aspect to the solitary vice of reading. That means books as generators of conversations have been displaced by other more immediate things. This is to be expected with increasing forms and mediums of entertainment/information. At the same time these additional forms are often maligned compared to reading.

But as Michael Chabon says, "Maybe the reason for the junkiness of so much of what pretends to entertain us is that we have accepted -- indeed, we have helped to articulate -- such a narrow, debased concept of entertainment. The brain is an organ of entertainment, sensitive at any depth and over a wide spectrum. But we have learned to mistrust and despise our human aptitude for being entertained, and in that sense we get the entertainment we deserve."

Leo Rosten says pretty much the same thing in A Trumpet for Reason,"...the blinding cliché. Some TV is superb. Most is as banal as its viewers. Was man's "intellect" really higher before TV? Do you really think that before television existed, people spent their leisure hours discussing Plato, Mozart, Gresham’s law?...Exactly how is intellect "sucked down"? And do you mean the lowest common denominator or the largest common denominator? The lowest can't be the largest."

Florence King in With Charity Towards None: A Fond Look at Misanthropy has an interesting take on television hatred and the celebrity culture, "The widespread hatred of television is a form of closet misanthropy of special interest to anyone who grew up in the radio era. We didn't hate radio and blame it for all sorts of ills. We didn't worry about how many hours a day our radios were on, we didn't lie about our radio habits ("I never listen to it"). We didn't claim that radio invaded privacy, and our newspapers did not contain self-help pieces entitled "Turning Off The Radio Habit"....electronic beast...Vitriolic reactions echo the fashionable complaint that television is "an insult to the intelligence", but intelligence is the handmaiden of cool reason, and something hotter is at work here. Television rouses our instinctive hatred because it is the only medium of entertainment in which the great do not keep their distance. Theater actors perform on a curtained stage, radio is a disembodied voice, and movies of the thirties and forties presented godlike stars who were figuratively larger than life and made them literally larger than life on giant screens. But the democratic size of the television screen and its permanent presence in our homes have deprived us of personages awesome and mysterious, damaging thereby the psychic dynamo that powers religious faith. In the primitive recesses of our minds, television personalities are to us what Antichrist and heretics were to the Middle Ages. "Oprah's Guest" syndrome-masquerading as compassionate broad-mindedness but really driven by the notion that dignity is elitist, it demands that people strip themselves of all that is seemly and wallow in maudlin sludge. Familiarity doesn't breed contempt, it is contempt."

Steven Johnson in Everything Bad is Good For You argues that current popular culture is engaging our cognitive faculties is more ways than before and in a feedback loop entertainment is getting more and more complex. Clay Shirky posits that we have moved away from a consumptive culture to a creative culture, one that is increasingly participatory. Perhaps the best example of this is Lost. In Living Lost, J. Wood says that with the alternate reality game, The Lost Experience , "Not only was Lost responding as a TV show to our experience in the age of the War on Terror(ism), but it was now actually insinuating itself into real space, in ways that required sharp eyes, exposition and technical savvy...The result is that the performance/audience borders start to collapse and what at once seemed like two distinct sides-one of performance, and one of audience-becomes the same side."

We should also be seeing changes in what a book should be (and really why should they be flat cut pages stuck together between two paste boards). New devices portend different methods of content delivery. Reading books wasn't really glorified at one point. These arguments are similar to the ones used to counter the success of such new devices. Perhaps both paper and e-versions of books might exist in a comfortable equilibrium. Kevin Kelly discusses the future books over at The Technium. Of course people still haven’t really mastered how to read or equipping themselves with the necessary skills.

(Photo: Old Spines by brighterorange)

Defining Science Fiction

2008-10-03T09:49:00.007-04:00

From The Norton Book of Science Fiction, Ed. by Ursula K. Le Guin and Brian Attebery¹

The credibility of science fiction has often been under attack. Science fiction has been dismissed by brisk evaluations and the defenses have been labored, partial and derivative. A common phrase used to describe science fiction is genre. Genre often refers to the common stock of concepts, icons, images, manners, patterns. While the idea of a genre sounds too rigid it can also be looked upon as a formal literary tradition, a fixed but living pattern. Readers therefore have a precedent and can understand and be thrilled by the diversions from the pattern. But genres often reduce to formula. Formula defines an item list of stock figures, motifs, props and locutions. For example, The Robot, The Spaceship and The Alien have escaped from science fiction and have become "Jungian Archetypes" of the entire pop culture.
The field itself is more than simple icons.
There are no boxed definitions of science fiction. Science fiction can absorb any amount of reality and has an open context. That in itself is a defining quality of it. Fantasy is the oldest kind of fiction and the most universal but science fiction can be distinguished from fantasy because science fiction simply by word association operates within the megatext of science and realism. The science may not be real but develops and builds from rational scientific and materialistic concepts. It is not seen as a fantastic subversion of the natural order by supernatural forces (the cause and effect being inexplicable). But science fiction sometimes draws upon powerful icons like FTL to facilitate narrative. One of the characteristics of science fiction is that it derives from or employs assumptions basic to science, scientific technology, and scientism. It also serves a social and intellectual function.
Science fiction carries a narrative load that has been abandoned by realistic fiction which has focused more on the individual psyche and personal relationships. Reporting and history deal with what happened; fantastic fiction with what could not have happened and science fiction deals with what has not happened. Therefore the question of differences between science fiction and other forms of fiction is one of degree.
But while science fiction maybe called a "literature of ideas" it is still a piece of art, and as such must be evaluated on its aesthetic value rather than merely on its ideas.

Update: Mike Brotherton on the false dichotomy between science fiction and fantasy.

1 Le, G. U. K., & Attebery, B. (1993). The Norton book of science fiction: North American science fiction, 1960-1990. New York: W.W. Norton.^↩

The most awesomest show evar!

2008-09-30T22:40:00.001-04:00

You should be watching Garth Marenghi's Darkplace right now! This show is "so radical, so risky, so dangerous, so goddamn dangerous" that it will blow your brain to smithereens. Consult your local wiki for more info but I’d rather have you simply dive head first into the show. Unfortunately its only come out as a DVD in the UK. All episodes are available on YouTube or on your favorite p2p. Or this could be a really good reason for getting a region free player.

A sampling of the show's awesomeness.

Twittering Away

2008-09-30T22:34:00.001-04:00

There's some concern about the current digital scene and its effects. Clive Thompson, in the Times Magazine article, Brave New World of Digital Intimacy looks at the social ramifications of maintaining a constantly available online persona. Two interesting quotes:

Social scientists have a name for this sort of incessant online contact. They call it “ambient awareness.” It is, they say, very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does — body language, sighs, stray comments — out of the corner of your eye.

Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting. This was never before possible, because in the real world, no friend would bother to call you up and detail the sandwiches she was eating.

Merlin Mann on 43 Folders, makes the case for a pause button on social sites.

Review: Simplexity

2008-09-30T22:32:00.001-04:00

(This is a review of the ARC received through Early Reviewers on LibraryThing.)

On the cover of Simplexity is the image of the innards of a watch, tiny mechanical precision parts built into a complex unit to display time, a simple but powerful unit. Simplexity is an emerging theory that proposes a possible complementary relationship between complexity and simplicity and as Kluger says in the introductory chapter, "Complexity, as any scientist will tell you, is a slippery idea, one that defies almost any effort to hold it down and pin it in place. Things that seem complicated can be preposterously simple; things that seem simple can be dizzyingly complex. A manufacturing plant--with its clanking machinery filling acres and acres of hangar-sized buildings--may be far less complicated than a houseplant, with its micro-hydraulics and fine-tuned metabolism and dense schematic of nucleic acids."

This book falls into the overpopulating freakonomics genre. Each chapter is headed by a question (for example, “How does a single bullet start a war?”) and feel like padded magazine articles with no serious exploration of the science of complexity or its more substantial applications. What Kluger does is serve as a quick stop tour guide pointing out examples of the interplay between complexity and simplicity in several social scenarios like stock markets, world wide conflicts, the workplace and healthcare. But the book wanders, often losing focus and with more interest in the confounding/confusing nature rather than the "complex/simple" nature of things. Perhaps the most interesting part of the book is the last chapter where Kluger examines why complexity theory fails when trying to explain something like creativity. It shows that anything that cannot be bounded within a formal system tends to be fairly complex in its own way!

Final Verdict? No buy, pass.

For a more detailed look at and criticism of complexity theory go to this two part article by Steve Talbott, The Lure of Complexity(In Context (Fall, 2001, pp. 15-19); copyright 2001 by The Nature Institute)

The Mirrored Heavens Q&A (sort of)

2008-08-26T00:48:00.001-04:00

David was kind enough to answer a couple of questions I had emailed him. Two of them were:

Q: There no cues for what the main characters look like. Was that deliberate on your part?

David: Dearth of physical cues was definitely deliberate. I had in mind James Ellroy, who (at least in his political thrillers) never provides much physical description. Marlowe gets a line of it, Haskell gets half a line (we know she has brown hair and freckles), the Operative has a shaved head and seems to be somewhat short, Lynx is black and has silver hair, Linehan's a big guy, and re Spencer we know almost nothing. It was part of a broader strategy at dialing a lot of character details low in the mix, and depriving the reader of a lot of the traditional/easy reference-points used to make sense of characters.

Q: How do you plan and write your action sequences?

David: I approach the action sequences in much the same way as the rest of the book: it's all planned out and choreographed well in advance of the writing. I'm not one of these writers who can just leap in--to me, this is like shooting a movie, so I'd better have a script/storyboard. The challenge, of course, is that whereas a movie can capture 200 simultaneous things on screen, a book can't--every sentence you write is another moment that's passing (or at least, it gives the impression of a moment that's passing), and you have to be careful to avoid repetitious phrasing. The weird thing about action sequences is how boring so many of them are to read, and I was determined to avoid that trap(s).

I can't wait for the sequel, Leviathan's Progeny!

Consumerism

2008-08-26T00:42:00.001-04:00

"...the first rule of consumerism: Never give us what we really want. Cut the dream into pieces and scatter them like ashes. Dole out empty promises. Package our aspirations and sell them to us, cheaply made enough to fall apart." — Scott Westerfeld, So Yesterday

Why write?

2008-08-22T00:42:00.001-04:00

From Hallie & Whit Burnett's Fiction Writer’s Handbook¹:

Why write?
To get more satisfaction out of writing than out of anything else certainly is part of what it means to be a writer. With distractions all around us, singleness of purpose is essential in getting at the natural rewards and pleasures of the tasks we set for ourselves. It is well to be able to say we don’t get the same pleasure from doing anything else. If the end of most men is right living, as has been said, the end of the writer is the strength and honesty of what he creates with the equipment he has and from observations he will make. He cannot afford to let anything in daily life go by without examining it after the fact.
There is abundant evidence that those successful writers who keep at their labors for more than one brief season, devoting energy and hours of work not exceeded in any other profession, do so not only because of the satisfaction this gives them but also from the intensity of their desire to write. Gentle French Abbé Dimmet once explained simply that “the experience of most artists is that the quality of their production is in keeping with the intensity of their wish.”
“Writing is a compulsive, and delectable thing,” wrote Henry Miller. “Writing is its own reward.”
We as writers should take our writing with all the seriousness we can muster — but never ourselves.
Why write? What else?
The most essential task of any novelist, short story writer, dramatist, or poet — those realists who have no guide but their own imaginations; those imaginative artists who bring flights of fancy down to earth — must be to strengthen the quality of belief itself. Belief, among other things, is a matter of focus, is keeping one’s eyes firmly on the ball.
Very early in life the writer must begin to question everything around him, precepts, parents, and motives, including even his own. He must be courageous enough to recognize beauty when he witnesses it, and not be afraid to probe deep into the sources of happiness, tragedy, or love. He must give fully of himself to sensation and form the habit of comparing one impulse or sensation with another, putting all this into words. And if he must write it into bad poetry, even this is good exercise at the beginning. He must work at self-education — that is, at finding his own truths and convictions — for this is of prime importance to any writer, regardless of any other education he may acquire. Honesty is clear-sightedness, that habit of seeing clearly, exploring deeply all the motives hidden beneath the surface. Of understanding one’s needs and finding for oneself what will strengthen the hand and give validity to one’s work as a writer. Honesty is also the practice of being truthful, of seeing the truth, and daring at all costs to use it.
The imaginative person’s sympathies are sometimes too easily aroused for remote subjects. Someone must care for mistreated animals on someone else’s doorstep, starving children in distant lands, bombed villages he will never see, and maybe send a contribution. A writer, however, has other responsibilities. When he does see and feel something strongly, personally, sympathetically, he must find a way to express this disturbance in his writing, using his sympathy or his sorrow or his delight creatively then or else storing it away in memory for the future. Sometimes far in the future; but eventually most of what the writer feels must come out in his work. ...empathy, a kind of self-identifying sympathy, a vicarious experiencing of the feelings of another, is a writer’s most valued gift. Empathy includes revulsion as well as attraction; it includes any kind of involvement that is used honestly and with acute understanding. Understanding is not always kind or forgiving, but without it we cannot pretend to write knowingly of our fellow man.
It is by using all our senses that we comprehend the full values of the physical world, and it is by describing them that we develop the subtleties and poetry of our language. Sight, hearing, smelling, touching, intuition. We know nothing without intuition, that sensory and mental gift by which we produce “with the least tangible alloy of extraneous elements” the best work of which we are capable. It is necessary to listen to intuition, to let it guide us into ways the conscious mind does not imagine, to reveal to us more than we thought we knew. The senses belong to all the arts, but it the particular obligation of the writer to use these gifts to illustrate the whole of life.
We absorb; we sympathize; we reject; we present; it all comes from our own selective memory in the end. Someone once advised the writer first to memorize his own life; to write from all of it he can remember. If we are sensitive to things others may have missed; if we have kept our interests and experiences fluid as in love, so that we are capable of merging our passions with those of another; if we have developed a memory that is active and reflective, that stores things for later use; and if from childhood on we have hoarded the pleasures of daydreaming-then we need not worry about the well running dry, we will always have material about which to write.
Flaubert wrote to Maupassant: “Whatever you want to say, there is only one [right] word that will express it, one verb to make it move, one adjective to qualify it. You must seek that word, that verb, and that adjective, and never be satisfied with approximations, never resort to tricks, even clever ones, or to verbal pirouettes to escape the difficulty.”
A writer likes to play with words. He is constantly turning his reactions to life into words in order to recall what it was that that moved or interested him. Every writer assumes an obligation to use the language he knows with care and sensitivity and meaningfulness. To put together what “really happened,” not as someone else would record it, but as his ear and sensitivity tell him is the only possible way for him to write. And even then he must work constantly to improve on himself, sharpen his awareness of words and their meaning tirelessly and lovingly. A writer must be forever studying and learning his language as he would a foreign tongue, for meaning, for vocabulary, for subtleties and inflection.
It is through language that we communicate best and most easily. But also, sometimes, most disastrously. Thought must come before words, although the writer has a special privilege: he may change his words, improve on them, edit and reduce them when he has said too much. If we find we have not made our meaning clear, if we have buried the substance of our thought in too much verbiage, we may rearrange, substitute the “one word that will express it,” that “one adjective to qualify it.” The writer need not be read before he is ready.
In the beginning (and always thereafter, of course), the writer must observe exact rules for the uses of words, for grammar, for the principles of composition. One must be sharply aware of words misused, avoiding verbose writing and clichés both in phrases and in our thinking.
There should be a sort of rhythm of thought in structure, particularly in paragraphing…Prose relates to the heartbeat, as do most satisfactory expressions of an art...
Prolonged and concentrated labor is a necessity that all successful writers understand. Work is that hard rock of reality that separates writer from wisher, that mountain which must be mounted again and again and conquered before a writer can claim the view on the other side as his own. Southey said, “By writing much, one learns to write well.” And so it goes. Each writer must eventually settle on his own best pattern of production: the hours in which the imagination is better controlled, the period of the day when uninterrupted work is most possible.
One cannot give one’s best to any other job and have creative energy left over for writing. Continuing performance is absolutely essential-allowing respite for those periods when the brain is depleted from its labor-but each of us knows, after a fashion, how best we will produce our most satisfactory work, and that, more often than not, regularity does matter.
Talent, as Flaubert said, is a long patience.
In the writer, says Trollope, both sympathy and imagination must be at work before a writer can attract a reader. One must also have something to say: pretty phrases, even an impressive vocabulary, do not always indicate talent in the writer. An ability to tell a story may. The need to say something in a particular way, to convince, to interest, even by means of nonliterary language, will more often than not lead one to writer who will become important in the literary world. Originality has no place if it remains chaotic, and fine writing is a bore if it has no story to tell or communicates nothing.
Does a writer write for himself, for other or maybe for money? It doesn’t matter if the talent is there. Talent is not as corruptible as may be believed, but it can be misguided and wasted. For economic reasons it can be used up on slick writing, for which the market seems happily dwindling; it can be delayed in journalism; or be dissipated by writing in other media where even a unique gift may be dishearteningly taken for granted.

1 Burnett, H. S., & Burnett, W. (1975). Fiction writer's handbook. New York: Harper & Row.^↩

The problem with reviewers

2008-08-22T00:26:00.001-04:00

"Poetry’s a medium, sonnet’s a format. Comic-book art’s a medium, the superhero convention’s just a format. If you hate eggplant and if you hate it fried, stewed, or au gratin, how the hell can you pass judgment on an eggplant soufflé that eggplant connoisseurs are doing cartwheels over." — Michael Bishop, Count Geiger's Blues: A Comedy

The most successful films for quite some time now have been genre films or influenced by genre, yet most reviews I have read never seem to be genre informed. Or they are often net published slavish fanboyisms incapable of identifying whether the larger cause of the genre has been served. Balanced genre criticism is what's needed. For there certainly is a need. If small cottage industries can be setup to analyze ponderous literary works so too must there be something equivalently rigorous for genre. But it must meet the genre on the genre's terms. And no pompous allegorical interpretations and commentary extractions that set teeth on edge please.

Jonathan McCalmont suggests it is the critic’s place to encourage a merging of genre’s disparate media tribes.

I'm not quite sure if a universal shorthand for addressing all the disparate cultural mediums would be a feasible solution. Every medium has its, for want of better descriptions, strengths and weaknesses and while a certain amount of cross pollination occurs, a book isn't a film isn't a graphic novel so on and so forth. A prime example is the pointless comparison between a book and its adaptation. I would have to also disagree with what is being called the ghetto-ization of genre. Given the power of the net and the undisputed mass culture medium of film which are already genre soaked, genre and genre ideas are already seeping into public consciousness. By definition genre is circumscribed and given it is what it is, it shouldn't have to pander to the mainstream mass to gain approval and affirmation. Often the genre provinces are quickly defended by zealous fans but that's out of passion for the work or field. At least people in the genre are willing to engage in some fashion with those outside. The opposite seems to be less true which means that ultimately most discourse ends up preaching to the choir. Genre up ending analysis seems highly unlikely to show up in wider pop culture pools or in even in say NYT. Which is unfortunate.

Review: The Mirrored Heavens by David J. Williams

2008-07-25T21:39:00.001-04:00

David J. Williams has written a hyper-kinetic bang-up of a novel with blistering action sequences that strikes like a flechette.

Set in the early part of a dystopian 22nd century, the geopolitical canvas is sketched out in quick brushstrokes in the preface of the book (and in more detail on the author's website) before quickly jumping to the action of zone tripping "razors" and hi-ex tossing combat "mechs".

Forgoing chapter breaks and using character icons to differentiate sections of the book, the narrative is a weave of intertwining stories of three primary and two secondary protagonists.

Claire Haskell, a razor, and Jason Marlowe, a mech, drop into a burnt out Amazonian basin city to quell a local uprising. Strom Carson, the mysterious Operative is on his way to the moon on a clandestine mission. Their orders are conveyed by handlers via a drug induced trance which reminded me somewhat of how The Handler operated in the Æon Flux movie. The plots of Lyle Spencer, an info trading European Combine's lackey, and Linehan, man-on-the-run are secondary to these top three but nonetheless compete with them in terms of action. Things heat up when a clandestine terrorist group called Autumn Rain, in a bid to capture power, starts to wind up the gears for a huge global war in spectacular fashion by blowing up the Space Elevator, the joint construction of the superpowers and the living symbol of the détente that they've embarked upon. What follows is a race on earth, space and the moon to stop them but nothing is what it seems and our "heroes" find themselves to be pawns in a much bigger game. Mirrored Heavens abounds in glee inducing icons of cyberpunk: huge and sometimes crumbling megalopolises, the ecosystem shot to pieces, plugging into the "zone", power suits with weapon racks, behind the scenes internecine political maneuvering, super sentient A.I.'s, info cartels, slipping into new skins...

Williams's prose has a telegraphic style which may turn some people off but is well suited to the furious pace. A minor quibble is that the dense non-stop action leaves little time for in-depth characterization. Cyberpunk fans and fans of Shirow's Ghost in the Shell and Appleseed will gobble this up.

Highly recommended.

The aim of science fiction

2008-07-25T19:40:00.001-04:00

Most fiction question our individual behaviors but it takes a certain kind of fiction to look at the big view. From Ben Bova's rant:

"The aim of science fiction, at its best, is to show the possibilities of the future. Not merely the gadgets, but the kinds of lives we might be able to attain, the kinds of problems that we’ll have to solve, the kinds of opportunities that we might achieve. Science fiction writers are not trying to predict the future. Most of them don’t believe that there is a “the future” to predict. The future isn’t inevitable and inescapable. It hasn’t been created yet. The future is built, instant by instant, by what we do here and now — and what we fail to do. There are tons of science fiction stories that show myriads of possible futures. ...But I suspect that a major part of the problem is that most people don’t want to think hard about where we are and where we’re heading. They’re perfectly happy to watch TV pundits argue with one another. They follow the latest attack ads that politicians unleash on one another. But they don’t buckle down to thinking about what our problems are and how we might go about solving them. Many people, I fear, believe they are powerless to make a change in the world. They accept things as they are, more or less. They complain, but they don’t work for change."

hello world

2008-07-25T09:53:00.001-04:00

main() {
    printf("hello, world\n");
}

world meet my blog. blog meet world.