Input: [Title] Past, Present, and Future of Statistical Science [Author] Xihong Lin [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2014 [Read] 2014/07/13 [Review]

Output: Past, Present, and Future of Statistical Science (ed. Lin et al 2014) is a large (52 chapters by ~50 contributors, 643 pages, 9.8M PDF) anthology of essays/articles/reviews/lists touching on all sorts of topics by many famous names (Efron, Rubin, Gelman, Wasserman, Tibshirani, Laird, Cook) - some of whom I know solely from methods bearing their names! The typesetting is tasteful & of high quality, with so many equations & graphs my PDF viewer visibly lags when scrolling. I read about it on Andrew Gelman’s blog & thought it would be interesting to read a broad survey of what’s going on in statistics. The anthology ranges from bureaucracy to professional autobio to reviews of subfields to speculations & challenges about future developments to advice about publishing & research. (Probably it would have been better to turn this into 2 volumes: the readers interested in careers & advice have to the technical material, while readers interested in that may not survive the sections about COPSS & autobios.) Since statisticians get involved with any topic they please, the subject areas range from deer in Canada - & trying not to fall out of the helicopter - to traveling to the moon to breast cancer to polygraphs. Given the heterogeneity, much of it was boring or over my head or both, but much was interesting & I learned about novel topics. In one chapter, a survey statistician reminiscences about how she stumbled into statistics accidentally & fighting sexism in her early career & another mentions that the methodological debates over the famous Kinsey studies of sexuality were her entree to biostatistics while a third was unfairly treated by a Coast Guard exam & learned statistics to prove the exam was bogus while yet a fourth picked math as his major because the signup line at the college was shorter & thereby wandered into the intersection of statistics & agriculture, & in another chapter, Arthur Dempster is still gamely defending the Dempster-Shafer paradigm of statistics after all these years, while in yet another chapter there is a discussion of issues in high-dimensional data I couldn’t understand etc. The introductory bits about the history of COPSS were boring, self-indulgent, & devoid of explanations why the organization functioned or what good it did or why outsiders valued it & what really went on inside it. The autobiography section features people who can remember all the way back to the 1920s or so, a time when statistics was very different than it is now. Reading them a few at a time (they’re generally easy reads), a number of interesting trends pop up. For example, people seem to get married extremely young, as grad students or undergrads, after short romances; it’s impossible to mistake the computing revolution: before the 1960s or so, computers & techniques requiring a great deal of computation never come up, but then they become increasingly common (sometimes with shocking details: one person mentions that to test a cool new idea, using a simulation method, ate their department’s entire computer budget for that month) & transformed approaches starting in the ‘80s, & Bickel mentions in his essay his “pleased surprise that some of my asymptotic theory based ideas, in particular, one-step estimates, really worked” when implemented on modern computers; a subtrend here is also that Bayesian methods seem to explode overnight then too & even frequentists begin borrowing Bayesian techniques & logic when useful (thankfully, Tukey’s quip that “The collective noun for a group of statisticians is a quarrel” may no longer be true); WWII appears as a clear break-line in the earliest autobios, & to judge by the autobios (a selected sample to be sure!) academia used to be far less competitive & one could (in the great post-WWII expansion) almost fall into a tenured position. Some bios are humorous, like Olkin’s : …Wald had a classic European lecture style. He started at the upper left corner of the blackboard and finished at the lower right. The lectures were smooth and the delivery was a uniform distribution. …The notion of an application in its current use did not exist. I don’t recall the origin of the following quotation, but it is attributed to Wald: “Consider an application. Let X1, . . . , Xn be i.i.d. random variables.” …The Master’s degree program required a thesis and mine was written with Wolfowitz. The topic was on a sequential procedure that Leon Herbach (he was ahead of me) had worked on. Wolfowitz had very brief office hours, so there usually was a queue to see him. When I did see him in his office he asked me to explain my question at the blackboard. While talking at the blackboard Wolfowitz was multi-tasking (even in 1947) by reading his mail and talking on the telephone. I often think of this as an operatic trio in which each singer is on a different wavelength. This had the desired effect in that I never went back. …Many prominent statisticians attended the meeting, and I had a chance to meet some of them and young students interested in statistics, and to attend the courses. Wolfowitz taught sequential analysis, Cochran taught sampling, and R.A. Fisher taught something. Or the history related is surprising, for example, the revelation that the Chernoff bound was actually proven by Rubin (yes, he did that too) in Chernoff’s essay “A career in statistics”, where he mentions a tragicomic incident in rocketry where a clever method for course-correction turned out to be unnecessary.While Cook’s distance in looking for problems in linear models stems from one bizarre rat (“Reflections on a statistical career and their implications”): …I redid his calculations, looked at residual plots and performed a few other checks that were standard for the time. This confirmed his results, leading to the possibilities that either there was something wrong with the experiment, which he denied, or his prior expectations were off. All in all, this was not a happy outcome for either of us. I subsequently decided to use a subset of the data for illustration in a regression course that I was teaching at the time. Astonishingly, the selected subset of the data produced results that clearly supported my colleague’s prior expectation and were opposed to those from the full data. This caused some anxiety over the possibility that I had made an error somewhere, but after considerable additional analysis I discovered that the whole issue centered on one rat. If the rat was excluded, my colleague’s prior expectations were sustained; if the rat was included his expectations were contradicted. The measurements on this discordant rat were accurate as far as anyone knew, so the ball was back in my now quite perplexed colleague’s court. The anxiety that I felt during my exploration of the rat data abated but did not disappear completely because of the possibility that similar situations had gone unnoticed in other regressions. There were no methods at the time that would have identified the impact of the one unusual rat; for example, it was not an outlier as judged by the standard techniques. I decided that I needed a systematic way of finding such influential observations if they were to occur in future regressions, and I subsequently developed a method that easily identified the irreconcilable rat. My colleagues at Minnesota encouraged me to submit my findings for publication (Cook, 1977), which quickly took on a life of their own, eventually becoming known as Cook’s Distance. And naturally, someone will choose to go meta & criticize the implicit goal of the autobios & explicit goal of the career advice section - as one would hope of statisticians, he recognizes the epistemological peril of a series of highly-selected freeform anecdotes; Terry Speed in “Never ask for or give advice, make mistakes, accept mediocrity, enthuse”: What’s wrong with advice? For a start, people giving advice lie. That they do so with the best intentions doesn’t alter this fact. This point has been summarized nicely by Radhika Nagpal (2013). I say trust the people who tell you “I have no idea what I’d do in a comparable situation. Perhaps toss a coin.” Of course people don’t say that, they tell you what they’d like to do or wish they had done in some comparable situation. You can hope for better. What do statisticians do when we have to choose between treatments A and B, where there is genuine uncertainty within the expert community about the preferred treatment? Do we look for a statistician over 40 and ask them which treatment we should choose? We don’t, we recommend running a randomized experiment, ideally a double-blind one, and we hope to achieve a high adherence to the assigned treatment from our subjects. So, if you really don’t know what to do, forget advice, just toss a coin, and do exactly what it tells you. But you are an experiment with n = 1, you protest. Precisely. What do you prefer with n = 1: an observational study or a randomized trial? (It’s a pity the experiment can’t be singly, much less doubly blinded.) You may wonder whether a randomized trial is justified in your circumstances. That’s a very important point. Is it true that there is genuine uncertainty within the expert community (i.e., you) about the preferred course of action? If not, then choosing at random between your two options is not only unethical, it’s stupid. Not all life incidents are amusing. In Gray’s “Promoting equity”, in between fighting the good fight, she proudly relates an incident I would be ashamed of, especially were I a statistician: Early in my career I received a notice from Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association (TIAA), the retirement plan used at most private and many public universities including American University, listing what I could expect in retirement benefits from my contribution and those of the university in the form of x dollars per $100,000 in my account at age 65. There were two columns, one headed “women” and a second, with amounts 15% higher, headed “men.” When I contacted the company to point out that Title VII prohibited discrimination in fringe benefits as well as in salary, I was informed that the figures represented discrimination on the basis of “longevity,” not on the basis of sex. When I asked whether the insurer could guarantee that I would live longer than my male colleagues, I was told that I just didn’t understand statistics. Learning that the US Department of Labor was suing another university that had the same pension plan, I offered to help the attorney in charge, the late Ruth Weyand, an icon in women’s rights litigation…At first we concentrated on gathering data to demonstrate that the difference in longevity men and women was in large part due to voluntary lifestyle choices, most notably smoking and drinking. In a settlement conference with the TIAA attorneys, one remarked, “Well, maybe you understand statistics, but you don’t understand the law.” A statistician asking for guarantees! & why should voluntary lifestyle changes affect whether a predictable difference be compensated for? Pensions are job compensation, not a moral code handed down from on high, & if men do not live as long as women, ’equal’ pay is never equal & defrauds them. Or, would Gray be against maternal leave, seeing as pregnancy is a “voluntary lifestyle choice”? & consider the sophistry: “in large part” - so would she have supported a differential which corresponded to the residual? If their analysis had showed up that black men drink & smoke even more than white men, would Gray be pleased to see a ‘black penalty’ applied to their pension payments? When is equal not equal? As always, one merely needs to ask: “who, whom?” The autobiographical essays are interesting, but somewhat dry. I was pleased to reach the meat of the anthology: the freeform technical papers. Some of the chapters introduced me to ideas I had missed, such as the “bet on sparsity” argument (Cook, pg103), which reminds me of one folk argument for Occam’s razor: you should assume the world is relatively simple & predictable & take actions based on that belief, because if the world is that way, then your actions will attain their ends & that is good, while if the world is inherently complex/unpredictable, then your actions will have no net effect which is neither good nor bad, so the former scenario dominates the latter. I paid close attention to Tibshirani’s paper later in the volume, “In praise of sparsity and convexity”. Similarly, Dunson’s “Nonparametric Bayes” introduced me to an area I had little inkling of prior. The biostatistics papers (eg Breslow’s “Lessons in biostatistics” or Flournoy’s “A vignette of discovery”) bring up interesting challenges & biases to keep in mind when evaluating the latest clinical research (a skill useful for anyone), & leave me heartened at the life-saving practical work that field is doing. Nan M. Laird’s “Meta-analyses: Heterogeneity can be a good thing” reminded me of the need, when doing my own meta-analyses, to not simply ignore high I2/heterogeneity but think hard about what moderators I should include to try to explain some of it. Others raised interesting questions I’ve wondered about myself, for example, Xiao-Li Meng in “A trio of inference problems” asks how big a biased sample of a population has to be before it’s of comparable quality to a random sample: Over the century, statisticians, social scientists, and others have amply demonstrated theoretically and empirically that (say) a 5% probabilistic/random sample is better than any 5% non-random samples in many measurable ways, e.g., bias, MSE, confidence coverage, predictive power, etc. However, we have not studied questions such as “Is an 80% non-random sample ‘better’ than a 5% random sample in measurable terms? 90%? 95%? 99%?” This question was raised during a fascinating presentation by Dr. Jeremy Wu…The synthetic data created for LED used more than 20 data sources in the LEHD (Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics) system. These sources vary from survey data such as a monthly survey of 60,000 households, which represent only .05% of US households, to administrative records such as unemployment insurance wage records, which cover more than 90% of the US workforce, to census data such as the quarterly census of earnings and wages, which includes about 98% of US jobs (Wu, 2012 and personal communication from Wu). The administrative records such as those in LEHD are not collected for the purpose of statistical inference, but rather because of legal requirements, business practice, political considerations, etc. They tend to cover a large percentage of the population, and therefore they must contain useful information for inference. which is what I’ve wondered while working on my census of biracial characters, since my sample is biased but capture-recapture analysis indicates I’ve compiled up to 1/3 of the population, so how much does that compensate, does it drive the error from biases down to the same size as the sampling error? Meng derives an inequality: For example, even if ns = 100, we would need over 96% of the population if ρN = .5 [level of bias]. This reconfirms the power of probabilistic sampling and reminds us of the danger in blindly trusting that “Big Data” must give us better answers. On the other hand, if ρN = .1, then we will need only 50% of the population to beat a SRS [simple random sample] with ns = 100…the same ρN = .1 also implies that a 96% subpopulation will beat a SRS as large as ns = … 2400, which is no longer a practically irrelevant sample size. Berger’s “Conditioning is the issue” is a bit lost on me but interesting is one passage’s discussion of turning notorious p-values into something more meaningful, error probabilities: The practical import of switching to conditional frequentist testing (or the equivalent objective Bayesian testing) is startling. For instance, Sellke et al. (2001) uses a nonparametric setting to develop the following very general lower bound on α(s), for a given p-value…p = .05, which many erroneously think implies strong evidence against H0, actually corresponds to a conditional frequentist error probability at least as large as .289, which is a rather large error probability. If scientists understood that a p-value of .05 corresponded to that large a potential error probability in rejection, the scientific world would be a quite different place. TABLE 23.1 Values of the lower bound α(s) in (23.4) for various values of p. p .2 .1 .05 .01 .005 .001 .0001 .00001 α(s) .465 .385 .289 .111 .067 .0184 .0025 .00031 Other papers are a bit of a misfire: I hadn’t heard of “symbolic data” before Lynne Billard’s “The past’s future is now: What will the present’s future bring?”, & the paper still leaves me wondering what it really is. Some I had already read - Gelman & Wasserman has already blogged about their entries. And still others make one wonder; in Rubin’s interesting retrospective of his greatest-hits, “Converting rejections into positive stimuli”, he encourages the reader to not be discouraged by the journal submission process as it is so random & some of his best papers were rejected - which makes me wonder, ‘so why have this whole journal rigmarole if rejection means so little…? would you use a statistical test which exhibited such poor calibration & discrimination?’ & his remark that “if you are repeatedly told by some reviewers that everyone knows what you are saying, but without specific references, and other reviewers are saying what you are writing is completely wrong but without decent reasons, you are probably on to something” is true. Overall, the anthology is interesting & worth reading (if not each and every paper).


Input: [Title] The Iron Dragon’s Daughter [Author] Michael Swanwick [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2012 [Read] 2014/06/02 [Review]

Output: I read it based on Anatoly Vorobey‘s review: “This is fantasy for adults: complex flawed characters, a world rich in detail, multitude of characters who live and do things for their own sake rather than to advance a plot point or help the hero. Utter disregard for conventions and cliches of the genre. A hero who is an anti-Mary Sue. Endless inventiveness of the author. To my taste, this novel is what books like The Kingkiller Chronicles promise, but then utterly fail to deliver. But if you’re a fan of Rothfuss, try Swanwick anyway, and you might get a fuller and richer taste of what you like.” I liked it a lot after I got through the initial section in the factory, which was over-the-top Dickensian enough to make me wonder if it was worthwhile. But it got better, and began unfurling into a mad Victorian/fantasy cross, heavy on the social oppression & economic exploitation, reminiscent of China Miéville’s bourgeois imperialist New Crobuzon. The plot breaks down into a few discrete chunks of the protagonist Jane’s life, which while highlighting the ruthless nature of life in a universe where the gods are real (the homecoming queen being sacrificed may be horrifying, but the consequences of not sacrificing are even more dire, as one memorable nihilist character makes clear; and our own society does not hesitate to sacrifice lives for its own ends, as with, say, coal-burning power plants) also highlight her cowardice and selfishness in betraying her friends instead of… what? We’re not too clear, as the world begins melting and things get weird in an Invisibles or Dick-style turn towards radical ontological uncertainty. (The dragon, incidentally, appears in far less of the novel than one would expect from the title.) This may sound tedious, but Swanwick really does throw all sorts of fascinating little twists in along the way that keep one reading: malls where time literally stops so you can shop to your heart’s content; factories with ’time clocks’ that age one if one doesn’t clock out; live gargoyles, with all the food requirements flying stone entails; a man who shrinks in his wife’s regard for being a coward until he’s the size of a homunculus & is trapped in a jar begging for death; markets in entertaining slaves among the eloi upper-class elves; magical engineers who are castrated to ensure they do not damage the magics they work with; academics who assault the castles of the gods in the quest for knowledge, and get burned; universities with purges that are literally decimating… Still, it’s a happy ending, I think. Swanwick puts it amusingly in a page of explanations: I gave her T as a reward for making it through to the end of the novel he’s the one worldly thing she wants - and, quite to my surprise, the Goddess threw in K as well. What happens next? Does Jane marry T and keep K as best friend? Does K steal T from her? Do they all fall into bed together? This one I really don’t know because the real reward I gave Jane for making it to the end of the book was freedom. I ran across Carol Emshwiller just after she finished writing Ledoyt and she said she was in mourning, that all these people she had lived with for years were suddenly gone and it felt as if they’d all died. “Doesn’t it feel that way to you, too, when you finish a novel?” she asked. I thought about it. “No,” I decided. “It feels like all these characters who have suffered under my persecuting hand have been set free. I imagine them running joyfully in all directions, as hard and fast as they can, so that I can never catch them and put them in another book again.” Anyway, going over some of the parts of it which amused me while I was reading… You know your fantasy is grim and imaginative when astrology is due to educational corruption: “Hello? I was sent here for remedial?” The pale man looked up. He nodded wanly. Unhastily, without emphasis, he picked up a book, opened it, paged forward a leaf, and then back one. “There are three stars in the heavens,” he said, “moving about Jupiter, erratic sidereal bodies which establish a lesser zodiacal process for that wanderer in its mighty twelve-year progression about the sun.”…“Excuse me,” she said hesitantly, “but what effect do these minor planets have on our behavior and fortunes? I mean, you know, astrological influence?” He looked at her. “None.”“None at all?” “No.” “But if the planets affect our fortunes—” She stumbled to a stop at the dispassionately scornful look on the pale man’s face, the slow way he shook his head. “Surely you’ll agree that the planets order and control our destinies?” “They do not.” “Not at all?” “No.” “Then what does? Control our destinies, I mean.” “The only external forces that have any influence on us are those we can see every day: the smile, the frown, the fist, the brick wall. What you call ‘destiny’ is merely a semantic fallacy, the attribution of purpose to blind causality. Insofar as any of us are compelled to resist the flow of random events, we are driven solely by internal drives and forces.” Jane seized on this last. “Then what you’re saying is that our fate lies within us, right?” He shook his head. “If so, it must be extremely small and impossibly distant. I would not suggest you put any reliance in such an insignificant entity.”’…She waited, but he did not elaborate. “In introductory astrology they told us that each person has a tutelary star and that each star has its own mineral, color, and musical tone, and a plant as well that is a specific for the disease that is caused by that star’s occultation.” “All untrue. The stars do not concern themselves in the least with us. Our total extinction would mean nothing to them.” “But why?” Jane cried. “If it’s not true, why would they teach it to us?”A dry fingertip tapped the page not impatiently but pedagogically. “All courses require textbooks, charts, and teaching aids. By the time the information codified as astrology was discredited and became obsolete, it had a constituency. Certain…personages benefit from the supply contracts.” Nihilist the plot may seem to be, but it’s leavened with some sharp satire; for example, bureaucracy in the factory: At last, late in the day, the inspector general arrived. A wave of dread preceded the elf-lord through the plant. Not a kobold or korrigan, not a spunky, pillywiggin, nor lowliest dunter but knew the inspector general was coming. The air shivered in anticipation of his arrival. A glimmering light went just before him, causing all heads to turn, all work to stop, the instant before he turned a corner or entered a shop. He appeared in the doorway. Tall and majestic he was in an Italian suit and tufted silk tie. He wore a white hard hat. His face was square-jawed and handsome in a more than human way, and his hair and teeth were perfect. Two high-ranking Tylwyth Teg accompanied him, clipboards in hand, and a vulture-headed cost analyst from Accounting trailed in his wake. School: After Grunt had called attendance, he cleared his throat. “The Three B’s,” he said. “The Three B’s are your guide to scholastic excellence. The Three B’s are your gold key to the doorway of the future. Now—all together—what are they?” “Be-lieve,” the class mumbled. “Be-have. Be Silent.” “What was that last?” He cupped a hand to his ear. “Be Silent!” “I caaaaaan’t heeeeear you.” “BE SILENT!” “Good.” It was only when she went to empty out her locker that Jane realized how overgrown it had become. Orchids and jungle vines filled most of the space within and a hummingbird fled into the corridor when she banged open the door. Consumerism: It was a scorcher outside, but the mall was kept so cool that Jane was sorry she hadn’t brought a sweater. The place was jammed with fugitives from the heat. They were recreational rather than serious shoppers, most of them. Their hands were empty and their eyes were clear. College roommate strife: “The dissection manual?” Monkey asked airily. “I ate it.” “You what?” “I ate it. Why else would I want it? I was hungry and I ate it.” “But I need it for class.”“Then you shouldn’t have given it to me.” Monkey’s beady eyes glittered strangely, maliciously, in her round face. “Really, Jane, you can be so dim at times.” With a sudden standing backflip she disappeared through the doorway. Jane’s hands clenched. But really it was no more than she had learned to expect. Roommates were forever eating your books, having anxiety attacks, adopting rats and carnivorous slimes which they then expected you to feed, getting drunk and throwing up on your best dress, moving into the closet and refusing to come out for months on end, threatening suicide the night before Finals, leaving piles of rotting leaves in the middle of the floor, entertaining boyfriends in your bed because it was made and theirs not, evolving into large bloodsucking insects. Monkey was actually good of her kind. Well, she could always pick up a new manual. Monkey snatched the pencil from her hand and snapped it in two. Jane closed her eyes and traced the sigil of Baphomet with her inner vision. When she was calm again, she slid open a drawer.“All right.” There was a pair of latex gloves within. “I wasn’t going to do this.” She pulled them on. “But you don’t exactly give me much choice, do you?” Credit where credit is due, Monkey didn’t back down. There was a touch of the trickster in her heritage, and the trickster gene was a dominant. She licked her lips nervously as Jane pretended to lift an invisible box from the drawer. “You don’t scare me.” “Good.” Jane swung a hinged lid back and reached within. “It works best if you don’t believe.” She removed an equally imaginary scalpel and held it up between thumb and forefinger, admiringly turning it one way and the other. “What are you going to do with that?” Jane smiled. “This!” She slammed her fist into Monkey’s stomach. Academia: “I have been going over your laboratory reports, Miss Alderberry.” Dr. Nemesis put an arm through hers, and walked her toward the front. “They are, if I may confide in you, disappointing, most disappointing in a student of your potential.” “I’ve been having trouble with the sophic—”…“You must surely realize why I am concerned for you.” “Well…” Jane didn’t really, but that double glare bored into her, waiting for an intelligent response. “I’m here on a merit scholarship, so I suppose—” “No!” Dr. Nemesis stamped her foot impatiently. As if in response the elevator door slid open. She steered Jane outside. They were on an office level now. The walls were decorated with large unframed oils of umbrellas and sides of beef. The runners on the hall floors smelled new. “I am not talking about mere money, but about your very survival! This is a Teind year, surely you must know that.” Jane nodded, meaning no. “The department heads are even now assembling the list of those 10% of the students who are… expendable. Your name, Miss Alderberry, is going to be on that list unless you straighten up and fly right.” She glared at her: weakly, sternly. …“What set me straight was one particular incident. My adviser, none other than the wizard Bongay himself mind you, had obtained grant money from the Horned Man Foundation to create a divinatory engine in the form of a brazen head. This was, you will understand, very early in the history of cybernetics. It was all done with vacuum tubes then…Then he saw how the head glowed and how the solder ran in little rivulets from the seams in its neck and with it the gold and silver of its circuitry. Then did the wizard Bongay himself scream, in such fury that I fled for fear of his wrath.” She laughed. “He lost tenure over that incident, and his life as well. That happened near the end of the fiscal year, and the University had been relying on that grant money. Everybody involved with that fiasco was executed by order of the Bursar.” “How did you survive?” “They needed somebody to write the final report.” The University library opened its doors at midnight and closed at dawn. The rationale given for such extraordinary hours was that they discouraged dilettantes and idlers from wasting the library’s facilities. Even for the School of Grammarie, which was widely held to have pushed the concept of liberal arts to an extreme, Professor Tarapple was grotesque. A burnt and crisped cinder of a creature was he, blackened and small, his limbs charred sticks, his torso rendered, reduced, and carbonized. His mouth hung open and his step was slow and painful. He seemed a catalog of the infirmities of age. He felt for the microphone. His hand closed about it with a soft boom, then retreated. The charred sockets of his eyes rose toward the ceiling. Jane realized that he was blind….Professor Tarapple groped for a laser pointer, leaving sooty handprints on the lectern top. He directed the pointer toward the slide with motions as jerky and unconvincing as a rod puppet’s. The red dot of light jiggled off to the side of the screen. “This is—” The head wobbled. “This is—is Spiral Castle itself.” Nobody so much as breathed. “No one but I myself has ever delved so deep into the Goddess’s mysteries. The Ocean above which it is suspended is Time itself, and so far as could be determined with our limited instrumentation extends to infinity in all directions. Next slide.”…Jane was having a hard time following the lecture. The harsh white image of Spiral Castle was like a magnesium flare. It swelled and dwindled in her vision, as if softly breathing. Her eyes pulsed, aching when she tried to follow the logic of its involutions. She had to look away…“Toadswivers! Curly-mounted bobtail jades! Codheaded pigfuck bastards!” With a start, Jane came to herself. Throughout the auditorium, the audience members were rousing themselves. A Teggish professor directly before Jane’s seat straightened with a lurch and a snort. A gnome to her left passed a hand over his mushroom-spotted pate. Professor Tarapple had abandoned his lecture in a rage. He was berating his audience. “Only one being—one! me!—has ever delved so far into the Goddess’s secrets and returned to talk of them. By cannon-fire, holy water, and bells, listen to me! I risked more than life and sanity to bring you these photographs. I—I—I was once young and tall and handsome. I had friends who died in this expedition and will never be reborn. We were caught and punished and punished again. I alone escaped. Look at me! See the price that I paid! So many times I have tried to tell you! Why do you never listen?” He was weeping now. “Woe!” he cried. “Alas for those who seek after Truth, for such is the Goddess’s most hoarded treasure. Ah, she is cruel and unfathomable, and bitter, bitter is her vengeance.” The lights came gently up. The applause was thunderous. One of the parts towards the end which particularly reminded me of The Invisibles: “One time, passing through the Carolinas somewhere between 2:00 and 3:00 A.M., Jerry and I picked up a white Lotus with two blonds in it. We honked and waved. They gave us the finger and put the pedal to the metal. I did the same, of course, but even with dual carbs it was no contest. We had a muscle car but they had a sex machine. They made us eat their dust….Ten-fifteen miles down the road we saw the Lotus in a Roy Rogers lot. We pulled in for some take-out burgers. There they were. We struck up a conversation. When we left, Jerry-D went with the driver of the Lotus. Her friend went with me…Anyway, there I was, a blond in pink hot pants rubbing up against me. I had my foot to the floor, her tongue in my ear, and her hand down my pants. I pushed up her halter top and squeezed her breasts. The air shimmered with the immanence of revelation. Little Richard was singing ‘Tutti-Frutti’ on the radio and it somehow seemed significant that what I was hearing had been electromagnetically encoded, transmitted as modulated radiation, reconstructed by the radio as sound, and only reinterpreted as music somewhere within the dark reaches of my head. I felt then that the world was an illusion - and a rather shabby one at that, an image projected upon the thinnest of membranes, and that were I to push at it just right, I could step out of the world entirely. I unbuttoned her shorts. She wriggled a little to help. I slid my hand under her panties. I was thinking that everything was information when I found myself clutching an erect penis. I whipped my head around. The blond was grinning wildly into my face. My hand involuntarily tightened about her cock. Her hand tightened about mine. They might have been the same hand. We might have been one person twinned. The car was up to about 100 mph. I wasn’t even looking where we were going. I didn’t care. It was in that instant that I achieved enlightenment.” And finally, the gargoyle passage. It’s too long to quote, but I’ve posted it at http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=HDrLMfQj


Input: [Title] The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett III: Multiple Universes, Mutual Assured Destruction, and the Meltdown of a Nuclear Family [Author] Peter Byrne [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2010 [Read] 2014/11/08 [Review]

Output: (~140k words, 4h read) Before reading, my knowledge of Hugh Everett was limited to basically the following sketch: a young American male who post-WWII suggested taking the Schrodinger wave-equation literally, yielding the infamous Many-Worlds Interpretation, and attacked over it, left academia for Wall Street where he became rich with an optimization algorithm, and in his absence, MWI very gradually gained adherents until it is now a respectable point of view (albeit still counterintuitive), and died at some point; also, some rumor that his daughter shot herself at a casino after losing, in a literal quantum suicide. This turns out to be incorrect and very incomplete: it wasn’t Wall Street but the Pentagon, he died quite young, MWI wasn’t attacked so much as ignored after being sabotaged, his daughter did commit suicide but it was at home with sleeping pills & had nothing to do with quantum suicide, and he did much more than just MWI & one optimization algorithm. Byrne starts in media res, with Everett rich and drunk and self-destructing, then jumps back to his parents to start his tale; whether because ‘past is prologue’ or because of the heritability of personality traits, we get a sense that pathology (substance abuse, emotional problems) ran in the family, and his father survived some scrapes with corruption to finish out a reasonably good life; Everett bade fair to do better as a prodigy, excelling university, and arriving at Princeton & IAS in its golden WWII moment - the war won, von Neumann still alive & at the height of its powers (inventing game theory, modern computers, and steering the Cold War), and academia rushing into its Faustian post-war bargain with the US government and embarking on decade of exponential bloating (which, unsustainable, halted in the ‘80s or so, and this cauldron of legions of mediocre researchers + government funds + publish-or-perish has contributed to the modern scientific context in which we are awash in bogus results and worthless papers). An exciting time, and a fertile environment. I was surprised to learn that Everett made contributions to game theory, which turns out to later be relevant to one of the main mysteries of MWI (where the subjective or Born probabilities come from), and only then turned to quantum mechanics. Byrne also covers his future wife, Nancy. He tries to be sympathetic, but it’s hard to like or find her interesting at all; her views are shallow and deeply conformist, she comes off as lacking real insight into herself despite all the navel-gazing, lies to herself and others, and to be a lump of flesh going nowhere fast. He wants to paint her as neglected and damaged by her relationship with Everett, and to paint Everett as a loathsome lecher who won’t take no for an answer, but it doesn’t succeed. I was left with a major question: why would Everett ever want to date her, much less marry her? (Dating her is the real question here since it’s clear why he married her: because she got pregnant and refused to abort, and given the straitlaced Pentagon world, he was put between a rock and a hard place. Byrne quotes her as denying this tactic, but that’s obvious bullshit, especially given the era.) After a jump forward to Everett’s optimization work, we go back to Princeton and the genesis of MWI: like Columbus and Einstein and some others before him, Everett asked a deceptively simple question - what if we just take it literally? As a nice Schrödinger quote points out, it’s odd to accept that the world or objects act like a wave-function up until they are observed and then they collapse into normality but to refuse to accept that ’inside’ the wave-function it will also all add up to normality: “Nearly every result [a quantum theorist] pronounces is about the probability of this or that … happening - with usually a great many alternatives. The idea that they be not alternatives but all really happen simultaneously seems lunatic to him just impossible. He thinks that if the laws of nature took this form for, let me say, a quarter of an hour, we should find our surroundings rapidly turning into a quagmire, or sort of a featureless jelly or plasma, all contours becoming blurred, we ourselves probably becoming jelly fish. It is strange that he should believe this. For I understand he grants that unobserved nature does behave this way - namely according to the wave equation. The aforesaid alternatives come into play only when we make an observation - which need, of course, not be a scientific observation. Still it would seem that, according to the quantum theorist, nature is prevented from rapid jellification only by our perceiving or observing it. And I wonder that he is not afraid, when he puts a ten-pound note into his drawer in the evening, he might find it dissolved in the morning, because he has not kept watching it.” Pursuing his idea, Everett wrote his thesis, and here we run into the major theme of Byrne’s book, one he establishes admirably well: with many quotes from letters and recordings and referee reports, we see Everett’s thesis adviser, Wheeler, turn from a courageous physicist, well-regarded for his daring speculations, into a biased coward who bullies Everett into sabotaging & watering down his thesis so as to not give offense to his mentor Niels Bohr. I’m a little familiar with Bohr’s philosophy of science & quantum mechanics from a course I once took on the topic, and I found it entirely without merit (the most unimaginatively instrumentalist ‘shut up and calculate’ viewpoint was preferable to Bohr’s ‘complementarity’, because at least one was not left with the illusion of knowledge), so to find an excellent case made that it sabotaged the initial presentation of MWI and responsible for a multi-decade drought in one of the best available interpretations… does not leave me with a good impression of Bohr, Wheeler, the power thesis advisors wield, or academic physics in general. Certainly it is understandable that Everett would leave academia and enter the military-industrial complex where his work was interesting, valuable, valued, and well-remunerated. Everett dived straight into the heart of US nuclear politics, the intersection of nuclear physics with military strategy and game theory and computing and operations research: what levels of bombs would be developed (the Super? and even more exotic weapons?), what military services would get what delivery systems, what would be the effects of nuclear war, what was the best way to run the Cold War? (In the ‘50s, none of this was set in stone yet.) It’s a fascinatingly complicated period, for an overview see: Turing’s Cathedral, Dyson (review) Radiance (review) “Old Legends” Atomic Audit The Making of the Atomic Bomb & Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb Fourth Generation Nuclear Weapons Shame: Confessionas of the Father of the Neutron Bomb, Cohen (review) Project Air Force: 1956-1996 Byrne unfortunately is too unsympathetic to cover the period fairly, taking the Dr. Strangelove route: everyone was insane and evil. This biases his coverage badly since he’s so opinionated; in discussing the Prisoner’s Dilemma, for example, he implies it shows the irrationality of rationality and hence the intellectual bankruptcy of game theory and all related exercises - but this is a confusion of what he would like to be true with what is actually true, because the Prisoner’s Dilemma shows up again and again in all sorts of guises in the real world, along with the tragedy of the commons, and you know what? People in real life often do defect unless additional mechanisms are in place (often being put in place as a reaction to all the defecting). One of his footnotes reveals this strikingly: In other words, rationality is a (sometimes) quantifiable quality. Most human beings would agree that it is not a rational act to cross the street in front of a speeding bus, or to poison the water supply in search of short term profit, or to depend on fossil fuels, etc. But people in power who do obviously irrational things are often compelled to rationalize these actions by falling back on agendized utility values and probability statements. Of course, if you start with an irrational premise, e.g. “nuclear war is a rational option,” no amount of utilitarian quantification can, believably, turn it into its opposite. Context is everything. This is a tissue of nonsense which exposes clearly that Byrne does not deal with the real world, but with a world of ideals in which there are never any hard choices or necessity to make cost-benefit tradeoffs and all that matters is what sounds good. Accordingly, he presents a one-sided picture; a discussion of the Bohm hearings omits any mention of why the US government might be so paranoid and worried about spies (the Venona decrypts come to mind, as do the many high-ranking Soviet spies such as Harry Dexter White) and might target people involved with the Manhattan Project in particular; similarly, he uncritically cites Sakharov claiming the US was responsible for the arms races (which seems like an odd reading of Stalin’s character and his fellow researchers, for that matter), and later overestimates of nuclear winter. This bias on the biographer’s part makes one wonder to what extent Everett’s results about fallout were accurate: it’s not like he would tell us if the report was found to be fallacious or since debunked. Still, while irritating and depriving the reader of some key context, the WSEG section seems comprehensive as far as it comes to Everett up until he left the Pentagon to start his own consulting business, and that’s what really matters. The business section is similar, but much less political as they consulted on more civilian topics. What he did is hard to tell: we’re held back by Byrne targeting the general audience - I would have liked to know more about the statistical techniques involved, rather than vague descriptions like “QUICK randomly sampled the vast range of probable outcomes to select the most probable results”, which could mean a lot of things; I can sort of guess what his ’Bayesian machine’ was (sounds like a Kalman filter implemented with MCMC), but I’m completely baffled by the section about ‘“attribute value” programming’ or what sort of database it was. It also sounds like Everett began drinking himself to death at this point (but why? he doesn’t come off as so deeply depressed about MWI being ignored that he’d be suicidal in the midst of all his financial success; given Byrne’s predilection for psychologizing, it’s odd that he seems to let this central mystery pass without much more comment than some speculation that Everett was just hedonistic), and the kids enter their troubled teens (but one would never grow out of it). Somewhat surprisingly, he didn’t manage his finances very well, living extravagantly, making deeply questionable investments, and failing to diversify, all in contravention to established financial advice, flaws somewhat surprising in a statistically and economically inclined man. Eventually, he dies. In the mean time, MWI was gradually being rediscovered and rehabilitated by the likes of Deutsch and novel approaches like a Bayesian justification of Born probabilities developed, leaving off at the present time in which MWI is a respectable position leading to interesting research and believed in by a good-sized minority of physicists; this is interesting, but already familiar to me. I will have to leave it to other readers to judge how good these parts of the book are. Overall, indispensable to anyone interested in the man, and a good account of a productive yet wasted life.


Input: [Title] Excuse Me Sir, Would You Like to Buy a Kilo of Isopropyl Bromide? [Author] Max G. Gergel [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 1979 [Read] 2014/11/02 [Review]

Output: (~95k words, <3h read) Insider memoir of a relatively American wheeler-dealer in the chemical industry finished March 1977, following him from high school dabbling in chemistry through to graduation & WWII university work to founding a small chemical synthesis company until he turned it over to a successor. Gossipy, detailed, a vivid look inside the industry. Long out of print, I read the online scan (2.3M). Gergel seems to have an amazing memory for all the details of his short stature, secular Jewishness, school life, colorful incidents (such as maiming a friend with injudicious safety procedures applied to potassium), the girls he swooned over (usually blonde), and classwork; unfortunately, some of the gossip aside, his school years aren’t that interesting since I have no idea what any of the chemistry he was studying was (the politics of draft deferment, official corruption, and the mindless patriotism of the day, are a bit interesting but he mostly hints at them). Things pick up markedly by pg60 or so when Gergel begins doing syntheses for pay, eventually escalating to his own business - and here a modern reader will start blinking and wondering whether Gergel is deliberately trying to make a deeply compelling case for the necessity of government regulation, expanded budgets for the EPA & FDA & DoJ, the Precautionary Principle, and (much) higher Superfund taxes, and whether his life might not be a proof of quantum immortality and a defeat for the forces of natural selection, so reckless and poisonous and dangerous are his concoctions and business dealings. So many of his co-workers and acquaintances die young of exotic ailments that I am shocked to read in discussions of Excuse Me Sir, Would You Like to Buy a Kilo of Isopropyl Bromide? that not only is Gergel still alive as of 2012, but Derek Lowe says he’s even written a sequel memoir, The Ageless Gergel! Derek Lowe reviews it thusly: I came across the book in Duke’s chemistry library in 1984, a few years after its publication, and read it straight through with my hair gradually rising upwards. Book 2 is especially full of alarming chemical stories. I suspect that some of the anecdotes have been polished up a bit over the years, but as Samuel Johnson once said, a man is not under oath in such matters. But when Gergel says that he made methyl iodide in an un-air-conditioned building in the summertime in South Carolina, and describes in vivid detail the symptoms of being poisoned by it, I believe every word. He must have added a pound to his weight in sheer methyl groups. By modern standards, another shocking feature of the book is the treatment of chemical waste. Readers will not be surprised to learn that several former Columbia Organic sites feature prominently in the EPA’s Superfund cleanup list, but they certainly aren’t alone from that era. John Walker: Throughout Max Gergel’s long career he has been an unforgettable character for all who encountered him in the many roles he has played: student, bench chemist, instructor of aviation cadets, entrepreneur, supplier to the Manhattan Project, buyer and seller of obscure reagents to a global clientele, consultant to industry, travelling salesman peddling products ranging from exotic halocarbons to roach killer and toilet bowl cleaner, and evangelist persuading young people to pursue careers in chemistry. With family and friends (and no outside capital) he founded Columbia Organic Chemicals, a specialty chemical supplier specialising in halocarbons but, operating on a shoestring, willing to make almost anything a customer was ready to purchase (even Max drew the line, however, when the silver-tongued director of the Naval Research Laboratory tried to persuade him to make pentaborane). The narrative is as rambling and entertaining as one imagines sharing a couple (or a couple dozen) drinks with Max at an American Chemical Society meeting would have been. He jumps from family to friends to finances to business to professional colleagues to suppliers to customers to nuggets of wisdom for starting and building a business to eccentric characters he has met and worked with to his love life to the exotic and sometimes bone-chilling chemical syntheses he did in his company’s rough and ready facilities. Many of Columbia’s contracts involved production of moderate quantities (between a kilogram and several 55 gallon drums) of substances previously made only in test tube batches. This “medium scale chemistry”-situated between the laboratory bench and an industrial facility making tank car loads of the stuff-involves as much art (or, failing that, brute force and cunning) as it does science and engineering, and this leads to many of the adventures and misadventures chronicled here. For example, an exothermic reaction may be simple to manage when you’re making a few grams of something-the liberated heat is simply conducted to the walls to the test tube and dissipated: at worst you may only need to add the reagent slowly, stir well, and/or place the reaction vessel in a water bath. But when DuPont placed an order for allene in gallon quantities, this posed a problem… All of this was in the days before the EPA, OSHA, and the rest of the suffocating blanket of soft despotism descended upon entrepreneurial ventures in the United States that actually did things and made stuff. In the 1940s and ’50s, when Gergel was building his business in South Carolina, he was free to adopt the “whatever it takes” attitude which is the quintessential ingredient for success in start-ups and small business. The flexibility and ingenuity which allowed Gergel not only to compete with the titans of the chemical industry but become a valued supplier to them is precisely what is extinguished by intrusive regulation, which accounts for why sclerotic dinosaurs are so comfortable with it. On the other hand, Max’s experience with methyl iodide illustrates why some of these regulations were imposed. keenerd: Some of the topics covered: How to acquire chemicals as a poor high school student. How to get the most out of college. Starting up a company, finding your first customers and expanding your markets. Being a supplier to the Manhattan Project. What chemical engineering was like before the EPA and OSHA. What went on to create a future Superfund site. The tricks and techniques of traveling salesmen in the ’50s. I made some excerpts conveying some of the key points.


Input: [Title] Chronicle of a Death Foretold [Author] Gabriel García Márquez [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2003 [Read] 2014/08/26 [Review]

Output: A quasi-police description of the events leading up to, then long preceding, an honor-killing of one Santiago. The style strikes me as vastly simpler and less magically-realistic than The Autumn of the Patriarch, and much shorter. An inversion of detective mysteries: it is agreed by all who the proximate killer is, and the mystery centers on the how & whydunnit. (Borges would approve.) As the witnesses and reports pile up, it seems to become clear that it’s all a farcical assemblage of bad luck, buck-passing, murderous traditional cultures of machismo, and accident, but doubt is cast from the beginning - the murder happened on a beautiful clear day, which in the village’s memory has become a dark rainy day; witnesses crowd around the magistrate eager to tell their involvement and exaggerate their part (“…the crowd that was pouring in to testify without having been summoned, everyone eager to show off his own important role in the drama…”); and the basis for the murder itself was likely a lie. This uncertainty renders the story sinister by the end - did the village conspire to kill Santiago? Did he anger everyone in a way we are not told of, because to provide a motive would confirm their guilt, and they collectively fail to help him, explaining the repeated slurs like ‘“He thought that his money made him untouchable,” he told me. Fausta Lopez, his wife, commented: “Just like all Turks.”’? (A nice example of cunctation: the mayor stop in to check on a dominos match so and is too late to take away the murder-weapons.) How much is Angela responsible for failing to respect the charade of virginity and deliberately sabotaging her marriage? (She is ultimately punished by the deliciously cruel method of returning 20 years of love-letters, unopened.) The assembled villagers in the square shout advice at the last second, but somehow, their exhortations serve only to confuse him and maneuver him towards his killers; the killers are made to remark their knives are rather clean given they’re killing someone. And so on. The more we read, the less we feel we know and the more worried we become that we’re being fed a pack of distortions and warped memories in which the events were far more dramatic and complicated than they actually were. The magistrate warns us that “Give [someone] a prejudice and [they] will move the world”, and the narrator remarks of one post hoc explanation that “It seemed to be such an easy truth that the investigator wrote it down…”, and “fatality makes us invisible” - or is it plot necessity that makes the victim invisible? The villagers know their stories must terminate in the death of the victim, and in the stories they confabulate, he must be invisible to have performed the actions ascribed to him. (Umineko no Naku Koro ni’s vocabulary is useful here: outside the cat box, it is known that Santiago was killed by two knife-wielding twins at such a time and place; but everything else before that is part of the cat box and can be endlessly revised.) But each story, however plausible in the singular, has a hard time surviving conjunction with all the other tales being peddled (“he never thought it legitimate that life should make use of so many coincidences forbidden literature”). And their story can always be continued by imagining or forcing consequences: For years we couldn’t talk about anything else. Our daily conduct, dominated then by so many linear habits, had suddenly begun to spin around a single common anxiety. The cocks of dawn would catch us trying to give order to the chain of many chance events that had made absurdity possible, and it was obvious that we weren’t doing it from an urge to clear up mysteries but because none of us could go on living without an exact knowledge of the place and the mission assigned to us by fate….Hortensia Baute, whose only participation was having seen two bloody knives that weren’t bloody yet, felt so affected by the hallucination that she fell into a penitential crisis, and one day, unable to stand it any longer, she ran out naked into the street. Flora Miguel, Santiago Nasar’s fiancee, ran away out of spite with a lieutenant of the border patrol, who prostituted her among the rubber workers on the Vichada. Aura Villeros, the midwife who had helped bring three generations into the world, suffered a spasm of the bladder when she heard the news and to the day of her death had to use a catheter in order to urinate. Don Rogelio de la Flor, Clotilde Armenta’s good husband, who was a marvel of vitality at the age of eighty-six, got up for the last time to see how they had hewn Santiago Nasar to bits against the locked door of his own house, and he didn’t survive the shock. Plácida Linero had locked that door at the last moment, but with the passage of time she freed herself from blame. “I locked it because Divina Flor had sworn to me that she’d seen my son come in,” she told me, “and it wasn’t true.” On the other hand, she never forgave herself for having mixed up the magnificent augury of trees with the unlucky one of birds, and she succumbed to the pernicious habit of her time of chewing pepper cress seeds. I am reminded of an old story: One day, Korzybski was giving a lecture to a group of students, and he interrupted the lesson suddenly in order to retrieve a packet of biscuits, wrapped in white paper, from his briefcase. He muttered that he just had to eat something, and he asked the students on the seats in the front row, if they would also like a biscuit. A few students took a biscuit. “Nice biscuit, don’t you think,” said Korzybski, while he took a 2nd one. The students were chewing vigorously. Then he tore the white paper from the biscuits, in order to reveal the original packaging. On it was a big picture of a dog’s head and the words “Dog Cookies.” The students looked at the package, and were shocked. Two of them wanted to vomit, put their hands in front of their mouths, and ran out of the lecture hall to the toilet. “You see,” Korzybski remarked, “I have just demonstrated that people don’t just eat food, but also words, and that the taste of the former is often outdone by the taste of the latter.” People do not live in facts, they live in stories; and as long as the story continues, they are satisfied. Everything has been brought to light, it seems, but nothing has been enlightened. By the end, the death has been foretold but remains unknown.


Input: [Title] Existence [Author] David Brin [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2012 [Read] 2012/12/01 [Review]

Output: Existence is best-seen as a rewrite of Earth, and Earth was a sprawling futurological serious novel which was trying to both world-build by including countless perspectives and quotes and discussions and terms but also put them into context to build a overarching thesis. Similar to Tad William’s Otherland (the fantastic first book City of Golden Shadow, not the horrible sequels), Dos Passos’s USA, or particularly Brunner’s Stand On Zanzibar (to which Brin alludes, actually, in having a alien say “what an imagination I’ve got.”) The overriding theme is, of course, the Great Silence. Brin’s solution, characteristically for a guy who wants to be the ultimate moderate and more moderate than thou, is to take up every solution: the Great Silence is due to more efficient physical transportation and memetic viruses and Berserkers and Lurkers and panspermia and ecological collapse and nuclear war and… This is a little impressive to behold, and overall, I did enjoy reading the book. Brin has had a few new ideas since Earth like the smart-mob. But for the bad: This jumping makes the book something like a huge primer on the Great Silence/Fermi’s Question, yes, but also for something of a mess of a book. The book is huge, but a good deal of the bulk is fat and self-indulgent: 1. the dolphin sub-plot is rehashed Uplift material, which only very charitably has any relevance to anything else in the book (I thought that we would at least see them towards the end on spaceships as a token nod toward justifying the time spent on them, but no!) 2. More germane subplots feel incomplete; the autistic kids, “cobblies” and the “Basque Chimera” form one such oddly underjustified subplot - is this a thing, now, lauding crippled autistic kids as secret savant heroes? I don’t know which narrative is more denigrating of the human suffering involved, the standard one or this one. (Autism spectrum may be useful in some areas, but only a little is necessary and even the high-functioning often fail: I read in the New York Times the other day that that famous tech firm which uses autistic workers has a 5/6 rejection rate of applicants just from the start. One must sift a lot of sand.) 3. much material is borrowed from his previous nonfiction or fiction; allusions to The Postman are well and good, but when I could predict the resolution of the Senator Strong mystery from the instant we were told it was an addiction… This also means that I can track how many authorial mouthpieces there are in the novel, and it’s pretty much all of them. Even people you think are wrong like Hamish are just acting as conduits for Brin’s own beliefs. This leads to the severe problem, in a repeated first contact novel, that none of the aliens were remotely alien, and the humans all seemed pretty similar to each other too. It made me wish for Stanislaw Lem, or at least Watts’s Blindsight. Brin also has a very weird attitude towards what he calls extropianism but most people these days just call transhumanism. For example, the bogus anti-caloric restriction argument Hamish gives; it is bogus because (a) none of those monks or monasteries are following nutritionally balanced diets, indeed, usually for religious reasons they’re following highly unbalanced diets if they’re not like the Taoists possibly actively poisoning themselves with mercury, and (b) the records do claim countless instances of extreme longevity, which of course we don’t believe because record-keeping was terrible - which means the evidence is so worthless and biased and corrupt that we can’t use it to claim the opposite either! I’ve told Brin this like twice before, not that he cared. But by the time the story is set, the caloric restriction question will be settled: the primate studies will be finished, the human CRers will be dead, and the underlying biochemistry (or lack thereof) will have been elucidated. Suppose he’s wrong? He probably doesn’t care, he’s dead-set against it anyway! I was a little awe-struck when he has his mouthpiece badmouth cryonics, after saying it worked and there had been revivals? WTF? WTF indeed. This attitude could be called schizophrenic. Throughout the novel, Brin seems to struggle with the fundamental problem posed by Vinge: how does he keep the story human given his belief in progress and his basic acceptance of the Strong AI thesis? He never comes up with a good answers, but blatantly hand-waves them away: an emulated rat brain goes critical and escapes into the Internet? Well, uh - nothing happens because I say so (wow, ain’t it strange)! There are even more AIs pervading the world, controlling countless key functions? Well, uh - nothing happens because I insinuate something about parents and children and them being grateful! (wow, ain’t it strange - ever see a grateful river, spider, tow-truck, computer…? Humans can barely be grateful, ever.) Humanity is a few decades away from a general nanofactory assembler in his story and thousands of crystal probes come to visit? Well, uh - the crystal probes are completely inactive and don’t carry nanofactories or anything despite it being a mindbogglingly great & evolutionarily fit idea and perfectly doable for them, because I say so and it lets me write adventure arcs with primates fighting over & chucking around glowing rocks! (wow, ain’t it strange) He’ll mock the extropians in the first part for believing in cryonics or uploads or AIs even though their most-criticized belief, cryonics, has been vindicated 100% in his story even beyond their hopes, their expectations of uploads are equally justified by events towards the end - non-destructive uploading, even! We’d settle for destructive uploads at this point… and so on and so forth. Well, uh - they’re right but they’re wrong, don’t you see! (wow, ain’t it strange)


Input: [Title] Singularity Rising: Surviving and Thriving in a Smarter, Richer, and More Dangerous World [Author] James D. Miller [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2012 [Read] 2013/04/25 [Review]

Output: You could see Miller’s Singularity Rising as an attempt to swim against the book current of Ray Kurzweil and present some of the other visions of the Singularity: specifically, the Intelligence Explosion school as exemplified by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Robin Hanson. It then mixes in a bunch of material on intelligence & genetics, so we might identify an additional subschool: that of Steve Hsu on embryo selection for increasing human intelligence. Miller succeeds in giving a wide overview of quite a few topics, from Hanson’s ‘crack of a future dawn’ em scenario to the Great Filter to comparative advantage & the advantages of trade as it applies (and doesn’t apply) to AIs to the intelligence orthogonality thesis (that intelligence does not imply benevolence) to the logic of arms race and its particularly unpleasant applicability to AI development. And then he tosses in the mentioned intelligence & genetics material, which I was a little surprised to learn from - I had read many of his citations (and actually host a few of the online copies of the papers on my personal site, gwern.net), but he still threw in some ones that were new to me. On a purely factual basis, I have relatively little to fault Miller for. He makes a risible claim about 1700s French life expectancies not hitting the 50s (true only if you include infant mortality, otherwise hitting 50s was perfectly routine - even in the worst tabulations, generally if you made it to 20 on average you would reach the 50s; see 0, 1, 2, 3, 4) but he is far from the first to make that mistake; he brings up dual n-back more than once, but he avoids making too many or overreaching claims on behalf of dual n-back such as the increasingly questionable effect on intelligence (see my meta-analysis); he seems to criticize people for not taking seriously the method of castration for life extension but doesn’t mention the issues with the data and the likelihood that the method would not work post-puberty (ie. for everyone who is able to morally consent to such a procedure). Otherwise… Otherwise Miller’s sins are simply that the writing is merely OK and while he does a reasonable job of, as Hanson puts it in his own review of Singularity Rising, “explaining common positions and intuitions behind common arguments”, he barely defends them or clearly justifies them. While I and many others involved in the area dislike Ray Kurzweil’s theories and arguments and books as being superficial, right for the wrong reason, overly optimistic etc, they do at least do their job of convincing people (and then hopefully they can adopt more nuanced or different views); but though I agree with a large fraction of it, it’s hard to believe that anyone could read Miller’s book and come out genuinely convinced of pretty much anything in it (as opposed to reactions like “that’s interesting” or “maybe”). For example, he does a nice question-answer sequence against the kneejerk bad-philosophy reactions to cryonics, but one could easily bite all the bullets and simply question the incredibly sketchy case he makes (yes, it’s great that wood frogs do cryonics all the time, but we’re not frogs). He asks that anyone who signs up for cryonics email him about what convinced them - I immediately thought, “50% odds that no one has done so yet”. (After writing this review, I asked Miller about this and he said no one had yet.) And aside from as comprehensive a layman discussion of the issues involved in AI economics and technological unemployment as I’ve ever seen, I can’t really name any original contribution this book makes. I can’t say I’m really glad I read it, but then I can’t say I really regret reading it (I got a number of IQ-related citations, a discussion of neo-Luddism, and info on the more esoteric possibilities of embryo selection). This is because I already know almost everything in the book and have read many of the citations already, so I am not the target audience; it’s good if you want an overview of non-Kurzweilian Singularity ideas and you don’t want to read through scores of webpages and papers, and more or less unique in conveying them all in a compact single place - so in acknowledgment of this, I bump my rating up to 4 stars (though for me it was more like 3). Excerpts: - intro-ch3 - ch4-5 - ch9 - ch10-12 - ch13 - ch14-15 - ch16


Input: [Title] The Corpse Exhibition: And Other Stories of Iraq [Author] Hassan Blasim [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2014 [Read] 2015/01/08 [Review]

Output: (~44k words) Short stories drawing heavily on Borges and the magical realists; Blasim writes in a deadpan vernacular in which even the most baffling, cruel or horrible events are noted calmly and passed on, in a world in which ‘confused armies clash by night’ while mere humans try to get along as they play endless roles with masks whose significance they do not understand for an audience they cannot see for an objective that does not bear examination (“The Corpse Exhibition”, “An Army Newspaper” and “The Reality and the Record” suggest obscurely that God is the artist portraying all these severities). “I know you now have some questions that are nagging you, but you will gradually discover that the world is built to have more than one level, and it’s unrealistic for everyone to reach all the levels and all the basements with ease.” Some set scenes are memorable; from “The Killers and the Compass”: Abu Hadid knocked on a rusty door that still had a few spots of green paint, shaped like frogs, on it. We were received by a man in his forties with a thick mustache that covered his teeth when he spoke. We sat down in the guest room in front of the television. I gathered that the man lived alone. He went into the kitchen and came back with a bottle of arak. He opened it and poured a glass. My brother told him to pour one for me too. We sat in silence, and the man and I watched a soccer match between two local teams, while my brother stared into a small fish tank. “Do you think the fish are happy in the tank?” my brother asked, calm and serious. “As long as they eat and drink and swim, they’re fine,” the man replied, without looking away from the television screen. “Do fish drink water?” “Sure they drink; of course.” “How can fish drink salt water?” “Sure they have a way. How could they be in water and not drink?” “If they’re in water, perhaps they don’t need to drink.” “Why don’t you ask the fish in the tank?” Before the bald man could turn to look at him, my brother had jumped on top of him like a hungry tiger. He threw him to the ground, squatted on his chest, and pinned his arms down under his knees. In a flash he took a small knife out of his pocket, put it close to the man’s eye, and started shouting hysterically in his face, “Answer, you cocksucker! How can fish drink salt water? Answer, you son of a bitch! Answer! Do fish drink water or don’t they? Answer, shit-for-brains!” Abu Hadid stuck a cucumber up the man’s ass and we left the house. I never would understand what the man had to do with my brother. Or “The Song of the Goats”: “As he drove through the wheat fields, he was barely in control of the steering wheel. The bumps were about to break my ribs, and only dust kicked up by the truck crept in through the holes in the barrel. The barrel stank like the dead cats on the neighborhood trash heap. Did my uncle pull out fingernails, gouge out people’s eyes, and singe their skin with branding irons in the vaults of the security department? Maybe it was the souls of his victims that drove him into the ravine, maybe it was my own evil soul, or maybe it was the soul that preordained everything that is ephemeral and mysterious in this transitory world. Seven barrels lay in the darkness at the bottom of the cliff like sleeping animals. The pickup had overturned after my uncle tried to take a second rocky bend in the hill. The barrels rolled down into the ravine with the truck. I spent the night unconscious inside the barrel. In the first hours of morning the rays of sunlight pierced the holes in the barrel, like lifelines extended to a drowning man. My mouth was full of blood and my hands were trembling. I was in pain and frightened. I started to observe the rays of the sun as they crisscrossed confusingly in the barrel. I wanted to escape the chaos that had played havoc with my consciousness. I felt as if I had smoked a ton of marijuana: a fish coming to its senses in a sardine tin, a dead worm in an abandoned well, a putrid fetus with crushed bones in a womb the shape of a barrel. Then my mind fixed on another image: my brother sinking to the bottom of the septic tank and me diving after him. The bleating sounded faint at first, as though a choir was practicing. One goat started and then another joined in, then all the goats together, as if they had found the right key. The rays of the sun moved and fell right in my eye. I pissed in my pants inside that barrel, appalled at the cruelty of the world to which I was returning. The goatherd called out to his flock, and one of the goats butted the barrel.” The endings are abrupt, sometimes twist endings, leaving one pondering what moral there may be, if any; often the lack of closure itself seems to be the point. Given such a enigmatic style, unsurprisingly some of the stories worked much better for me than others (in particular, when he strays into clearer political commentary, the stories seem to get weaker). Hits: “The Corpse Exhibition” (de Quincey-esque) “The Killers and the Compass” (nihilistic) “The Green Zone Rabbit” & “An Army Newspaper” (magical realistic) “Crosswords” “The Song of the Goats” “The Reality and the Record” Misses: “The Hole” “The Madman of Freedom Square” “The Iraqi Christ” “A Thousand and One Knives” “The Composer” “That Inauspicious Smile” “The Nightmares of Carlos Fuentes”


Input: [Title] Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II [Author] Keith Lowe [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2012 [Read] 2014/12/07 [Review]

Output: (~144k words, ~4h) Nonfiction European history by Keith Lowe. Savage Continent is a fascinating book on the bloody aftermath of WWII as the destruction wound down, the lingering consequences of anarchy worked themselves out in the sudden peace, and people tried to find a new equilibrium, punishing collaborators and finishing the ethnic cleansings. Quickly summarized on NPR: “I was used to seeing these wonderful, cozy myths about the way the war ended,” he tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross, “and everybody celebrating and sailors grabbing hold of nurses in New York’s Times Square and kissing them and all of these sort of things. And I was aware that it hadn’t quite ended like that.” Europe, he says, was so devastated that “it’s difficult for us to quite realize how bad the destruction was.” WWII for Americans remains the good war; while one may be familiar with tarnished aspects of that (the atrocities in the Pacific, the unnecessary atomic bombings of Japan, the domestic censorship, etc), one hears less about the post-war period. Presumably after liberation, things were cleaned up quickly and calmly and a few years later our historical memory turns to the start of the Cold War. An example of the fluffiness I have in mind is an old movie I watched in August, Three Coins in the Fountain, a romantic comedy set in post-war Rome, where while there is still poverty and recovery from the war, things are basically OK. But one might have a better idea from my earlier reading, Catch-22‘s Italy scenes; or from Gravity’s Rainbow’s depiction of partitioned Germany’s fierce stew of black-marketeering, Communism, corruption, crime, destruction, and prostitution. The end of WWII left much business unfinished: Wages of Destruction covers in detail the slave labor forces drawn from conquered Europe which worked in Germany up until defeat, and the parlous food situation of Germany and Europe at large - so what happened after? With all these victorious horny occupation forces? With the slave laborers, and the Jews, and the guerrillas or partisans or thieves or black-marketeers? How were morals slowly restored after being corrupted by the exigencies of war and the struggle for survival, and what was seen as now possible after the Holocaust? The answers are rarely pretty, but Lowe gives a synoptic view. It can be hard to understand the early Cold War: what were the Americans & Europeans thinking when they set up Operation Gladio? What was with the persecution of homosexuals or the “Red Scare” & McCarthy? Or, when reading through Bryne’s The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett (review), one can see on display his incomprehension of how anyone could plan for nuclear war or be willing to go to the edge or the security mindset. But here we see it put in context: a Europe only just liberated from one despotism, half of which has been handed over to another despot even worse and who has displayed the ruthless techniques of subversion and rewriting society on a grand scale (chapter 25, “Cuckoo in the Nest: Communism in Romania”, is a surprisingly lengthy account of the sausage factory of of Communization - first, start with the internal security offices, exploit the electoral process, destroy opponents in detai, and finally with a captive government take naked control and begin the purges), in which Communist parties were not a political curiosity but popular, even a plurality sometimes. Without the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to see how one might resort to deep states, alliances with the Mafia, and so on. Throw on top of this the festering ethnic hatreds which all sides struggled to control or exploit, which had independent lives of their own… It’s hard to not see the echoes today: the Crimea appears often in Savage Europe, as it has in recent news; mentions of ’Novorossiya’ would not be out of place; the Ukraine is battered so relentlessly in WWII and afterwards that contemporary events look not like an aberration but a return to business as usual; and can Finland rest very easy about its independence from Russia when it gained its independence not that long ago and long memories are so politically profitable? An enlightening and timely book. Excerpts: Introduction-3 4,5 6-8 9-11 12-14 15-19 20-23 24-Conclusion


Input: [Title] Quantum Computing since Democritus [Author] Scott Aaronson [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2013 [Read] 2013/06/17 [Review]

Output: Aaronson’s book is based off his online lecture notes which I hadn’t read before though I’ve read his blog for years. I was really excited when the book was announced, since I hoped for expanded better version of his incredibly interesting paper/monograph “Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity” (abstract: “…In particular, I argue that computational complexity theory - the field that studies the resources (such as time, space, and randomness) needed to solve computational problems - leads to new perspectives on the nature of mathematical knowledge, the strong AI debate, computationalism, the problem of logical omniscience, Hume’s problem of induction, Goodman’s grue riddle, the foundations of quantum mechanics, economic rationality, closed timelike curves, and several other topics of philosophical interest. I end by discussing aspects of complexity theory itself that could benefit from philosophical analysis.”), and see also his more recent “The Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine”. The book turns out to be excellent, but not the 5-star universally-compelling, suitable for the layman & professional alike, complete coverage of all that is interesting about computational complexity and quantum I was hoping for. I’d say probably that one could get 80% of the value from reading “Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity”, and even more if one is not particularly interested in computational complexity or quantum computing for their own sakes. Pros: - best book I’ve ever read on computational complexity - repeatedly throws out fascinating observations - learned a lot of new things even after years reading Aaronson’s blog - PAC learning, Blum’s speedup theorem, Tarski’s decision algorithm - humor better than expected Cons: - some key arguments are sketched out briefly or badly (eg. I don’t know how anyone would understand Aaronson’s version of Cantor’s diagonal proof, compared to longer better-illustrated versions like Hofstadter’s in Gödel, Escher, Bach) - the complex-probability version of quantum mechanics didn’t seem much more transparent to me than other versions; maybe if I had a physics degree? (Not that I really understood the ‘Quantish’ universe in Drescher’s equally excellent book Good and Real, either.) - overuse of complexity zoo abbreviations - no discernible connection to Democritus or the Democritus quote - some later chapters highly technical and specialized and uninteresting (eg. the size of quantum states), not always meaningfully connected - Aaronson randomly inserts bizarre and sloppy anti-Bayesian digs - like at the end of his chapter on anthropics, he seems to think it refutes the ‘religion’ of Bayesianism. Dude, WTF? No one understands or agrees on anyone in anthropics, that’s the whole point of half the field (constructing paradoxes & unpleasant implications of the most sensible principles), and you want to use anthropics as an argument against Bayesianism‽ You want to disprove the eminently successful & practical by the useless & bizarre? If ever there was a moment that the saying ‘one man’s modus tollens is another man’s modus ponens’ was appropriate… I made excerpts of the book as I read it: - Preface - chapters 1-3 - 4-5 - 9-11 - 15-16 - 22


Input: [Title] The Machiavellians, Defenders of Freedom [Author] James Burnham [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 1988 [Read] 2012/10/05 [Review]

Output: The best part of the book for me was that section which is already available online, “Dante: Politics as Wish” - Burnham’s convincing examination of Dante’s little-known book on divine-right-monarchical politics as intellectually dishonest & servile justification of treason. Less convincing is his idolization of Machiavelli† as a transparent writer who meant exactly what he said and had no ulterior motives or proximate politics underlurking his writings; this claim would come as quite a shock to any Straussians in the room, and also doesn’t explain why some of his advice to The Prince was terrible advice or why he didn’t ever try to spread it about (Dietz mentions these details as he makes the case in her 1986 paper “Trapping The Prince: Machiavelli and the Politics of Deception” that the Republican Machiavelli was dispensing deliberately bad and insane advice given the context) which rather makes one wonder what Burnham is going on about when he talks about Italy being told by Machiavelli to reunify to form a viable nation-state but refusing to. † which actually surprised me: I had expected from the title that Burnham would go with some sort of Noble Lie theory in which Machiavellians ‘manufacture consent’ and defend republics or democracies from the illiberal masses Similarly, his analyses of all politics or social movements as elite class warfare or expressions of the Iron Law of Oligarchy are interesting and I think to a large extent accepted these days (eg. the field of public choice), but his actual uses of the idea seem fairly inept. He is good enough to make a number of specific predictions… pretty much all of which are wrong. For example, he predicts that post-WWII that the military would expand massively and form a real faction as opposed to a little ‘puddle’ (right) and that officers would enter the governing elites and change the composition of the ruling classes (wrong; Eisenhower was elected president, but there is no visible change in composition - few presidents or candidates have benefited from service, and contenders like Colin Powell or Wesley Clark have either not run or sunk like a stone. Congress remains a province of lawyers, and no one gets wealthy in the military until they take the revolving door), and further that his loosely defined Bonapartism is inevitable although I do not recognize Clinton, Bush, or Obama as being very Bonaparte-like figures. On pg259-260, he presents a doozy of “scientific statements about social matters”: …Thus we now may know, with considerably probability, that: if the state absorbs under centralized control all major social forces, then political liberty will disappear; if, after this war, Europe is again divided into a considerable number of independent sovereign states, then a new war will begin in Europe within a comparatively short time; if the present plan of military strategy (i.e., submarine attrition warfare, and “island-hopping”) continues unchanged in the East, then Japan will not be definitely crushed for many, many years, and perhaps never; if the present Administration plans to remain in office after 1944, then it will have to curtail political liberty further; and so on. These statements were published in 1943, well after such events as the Battle of Midway (June 1942). About the best I can say is that charitably, the counterfactual precondition for one may not have been true (if we assume ‘Administration’ refers to FDR, and not his Vice President, Truman, who succeeded FDR on his premature death and then was re-elected with no visible brownshirts stuffing pollboxes). The rest are simply embarrassing. The science of politics must indeed have been young… (Or perhaps there’s some other common thread to the political criticism that opens and closes the book. Always a problem with authors discussing deception.)


Input: [Title] The Black Company (The Chronicle of the Black Company, #1) [Author] Glen Cook [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 1992 [Read] 2013/06/08 [Review]

Output: I read the trilogy in basically one sitting after reading the interesting opening to The Black Company on Tor. I enjoyed the first book a great deal: it’s in a fairly stock medieval setting, but it handles the dark fantasy well and the plot quickly curdles into something more complex than expected as we gain entree via Croaker to the plotting of the Taken and the Lady, clever gambits & strategies, all ending in the resolution of all plots, defeat of the Dominator, and incidentally, the discrediting of the stock fantasy trope of a Joan-of-Arc-style messiah who will lead their forces to victory over the evil oppressor. It’s also interesting wondering what Croaker is concealing from us, what his sins are: he tells us, the readers of his Annals, that he has concealed a great deal and softened other parts. The downsides are few since it’s a quick read: we see entirely too much of the Company’s wizards (how many times do we need to be told that Silent is silent? or that One-Eye has just one eye? or that Goblin gets the better of One-Eye?), and it doesn’t do a good job putting any real doubt into our minds about whether the Lady is the least of evils in the North, since she countenances quite a bit and the rebels’ sins seem like the usual sort of thing which happens in war and then the wild dogs are put down during peacetime. Book 2, Shadows Linger, was in some respects even better than The Black Company. While almost all the Taken are gone and so the scope for plotting has diminished considerably, instead we get a cozy intense little drama set in Juniper, of plotting & murder & corruption with the black castle in the background rewarding & driving it all with its tempting silver as it works towards its own little doomsday (you might call it a collective action problem!). Shed’s plot thread is considerably more compelling than Croaker’s this time, as we watch him give in to weakness, folly, and bad luck time and again, each time helping the castle grow a little closer to completion and finally triggering an epic battle destroying the entire town and shattering the Black Company. (The focus on the locals also has the benefit of not over-exposing the Company wizards and letting us see them from an ‘outsider’ perspective to restore their sheen of interest.) While admittedly the black castle is more than a little contrived (the Dominator foresaw his defeat and this was the only countermeasure? the castle took 700 years to mature? he didn’t foresee the Juniper death cult before entrusting his last best hope of resurrection to it?), the plot overall still works well, and the creatures of the castle start to give an impression of why allying with the Lady might be a good idea. Book 3, The White Rose, sees it all fall apart. We’re plopped on the Plain of Fear at the heart of the renewed rebellion, which is OK enough, and we start learning what happened with Bomanz to release the Lady & the Ten which is even better. But the rebellion is a tawdry little affair, and the plot unengaging. Raven’s foolishness is difficult to credit. The White Rose’s power is almost too powerful. Parts don’t seem to hang together (how do Tracker & Toadkiller Dog arrive with Raven’s letter if they are only released by his interference?). The final alliance is too easily accomplished. The new Taken are only names. The finale is a succession of deus ex machinas - Father Tree’s offspring on top of the silver spike on top of the true effect of naming (if all it takes to destroy someone’s powers is to name them, why did this never happen before, and why were we told that true names merely allowed penetrating a magician’s spells and defenses?) On top of that, the finale is almost anti-climactic: they dismantle the defenses and neutralize the Dominator using the Rose, and bury him more thoroughly. Oh. Well, OK… The book isn’t so much bad, as disappointing since it features none of the intricacy of the previous books, is almost oddly streamlined and ‘easy’, and takes some easy way outs. I had come to expect more from Cook.


Input: [Title] Life in Our Phage World [Author] Forest Rohwer [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2014 [Read] 2015/02/10 [Review]

Output: (~400 pages; 4 hours) Saw a New Yorker article on phages - viruses specialized to prey on bacteria - and it mentioned the book was available; so I downloaded the biggest file and started reading. The world of phages is more than a little scary. They have been evolving for billions of years, their numbers are so vast every writer in this anthology resorts to scientific notation (and when they don’t, the numbers are so unfamiliar they look like typos: “By killing nonillions of Bacteria, they have major effects on global energy and nutrient cycles…”), and their generation time is as low as minutes, making for dizzying amounts of selection pressure and optimization - phages seem to have explored every possible way of attacking, subverting bacteria, replicating faster, compacting and making themselves more efficient, and won every arms-race bacteria started with them. If you think you’ve learned some generalization about phages, the next chapter may disabuse you by covering a phage which breaks that rule; and if it doesn’t, it may describe a back and forth sequence of arms races 4 or 5 steps deep. We learn about eerie dynamics like “kill-the-winner”, how φX174 squeezes several genes in by encoding them as overlapping with other genes (and then it gets spookier: “Even in this extremely small genome of a well-studied phage, two genes are not essential for phage replication in the lab, and thus their function has not been determined.”) or how phages proved DNA encoded genetics and their tools have been appropriated for genetic engineering and cancer research (most recently, the CRISPR proteins, a bacterial anti-phage defense system, have been stolen), or the exotic & dangerous locales phage researchers sometimes travel to in order to collect new phage samples or do clinical trials with phage therapy (India and the former USSR, mostly), or how “temperate” phages invade host bacteria but don’t burst it immediately but set up clever timing mechanisms to determine the best time & place to eat their host, or how phages “choose” whether to extend their “whiskers” / “tails” while floating around hoping to latch on to a bacteria (which is unexpectedly active a thing to do for a virus), or (reminiscent of polymorphic computer viruses) they invent mechanisms to shuffle their genes & vulnerabilities implemented in as few genes/proteins as possible. Not all the facts are intimidating - some of the temperate phages help out their host bacteria by bringing along particularly useful genes like photosynthesis, to undo the damage the phage causes; phages preying on bacteria increase bacterial production because when the phages burst bacteria, the bacteria guts are liberated for other bacteria to eat rather than the bacteria getting hoovered up by an amoeba or hydra or something and the resources being locked away and “lost from the productive surface waters, falling as marine snow to deep ocean communities.” Others are intimidating but in a good way (why do our delicious nutritious moist mucal membranes like our noses not get eaten by bacteria? because there’s an even more incredible density of phages in mucus, 40:1, than out, 10:1). The material is presented engagingly - the vocabulary is a bit specialized but explained as it goes, and one can at least follow many of the articles. Most of the articles are interesting, even, although a few enthuse about aspects of proteins or DNA I can’t follow and some are uninteresting to an outsider (who cares about taxonomy?). The illustrations are worth looking at. I have to note the genomes: phages are such genetic minimalists that a functional overview of the gene-regions of phages are presented before each one, and they are sometimes barely a page.


Input: [Title] Tombstone: The Untold Story of Mao’s Great Famine [Author] Yang Jisheng [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2012 [Read] 2013/08/08 [Review]

Output: The statistics and anecdotes are fairly horrifying, and the sheer profusion drills in how widespread the famine was. But for me, the most fascinating part of Tombstone was how the vast Chinese government hierarchy rippled policies and misinformation up and down it - how the local cadres tried to bow to the demands they were hearing from higher up, how the higher ups took the falsified statistics and claims often at face value, and how the highest officials in Beijing seem almost childishly helpless as they stagger between skepticism of reports given them and unthinking acceptance of positive results. Mao particularly comes to mind in his constant swerving between “left deviationism” and “right deviationism” as he tries to get communal kitchens to work and takes at face value the harvest figures and “sputniks” (even as in other incidents, he scoffs at a local official, telling him flat out that such yields were simply impossible), as he is flattered by under-officials; despite his information problems, he astonishingly repeatedly engages in tactics of announcing liberal discussion and then brutally punishing anyone who was foolish enough to do aught but flatter Mao and his policies. Indeed, as Jisheng says, officials were placed into a situation of ‘slaves to those above, tyrants to those below’ (or however his phrase went). With such perverse incentives, it’s no surprise that we run into such perfectly Hayekian examples as ‘deep plowing’ or ‘sputniks’ or ‘close planting’ or the failure of communes to realize any gains of scale (and did realize diseconomies, like the example of how communes needed lumber to fire their large ovens/stoves rather than the little bits of grass individual households could use). What is surprising is how effective the Chinese government was in maintaining control despite these severe systemic problems. How could so many millions starve to death, and no province rise up in rebellion? How could the revolts be so small scale, when the abuses were so bad and the death tolls large fractions of entire local populations? How did emigration not overwhelm any checks set up? It’s easy to agree that Sen is basically right: Mao’s famine could not have happened in any country with remotely democratic institutions like India, because the pressure would simply have overwhelmed any coercion the feeble government could orchestrate. But there’s also a flip side here: Mao remarks with surprise ‘how good’ the Chinese people were, that he could summon millions and disperse them with a wave of his hand, and another high official says similarly that it is only the goodness of the people which prevented the Army from being called in. Jisheng is at pains to show that the Communist propaganda worked and the people were not uniformly cynical about the regime like the Russians at the end of the USSR were: many officials sacrificed their careers or lives for their people, high officials are routinely shocked when they return to their home villages, and throughout we see people who are in all seriousness convinced that all the faults stem from local or midlevel officials and if only they can get word to the Emperor in Beijing all will be made well. This naive faith, which initially strikes one as pathetic & moronic & lacking any critical thinking makes me wonder if it could also be related to how China seems to have vastly outperformed India in the past decades, since it switched to sane economic policies; if the Chinese people’s faith and hard work could lead to such utter disaster when applied to futile policies, does it yield equally unusual results when finally applied correctly?