Tag: books

Hyperbole and a Half

Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things that Happened , by Allie Brosh, is an honest-to-goodness summer read. You will rip through it in 3 hours, tops. But you’ll wish it went on longer, because it’s funny and smart as hell. I must have interrupted Melinda 12 times to read to her passages that made me laugh out loud.

The book consists of brief vignettes and comic (in both senses of the word) drawings about Brosh’s young life (she’s in her late 20s). It’s based on her wildly popular website.

Brosh has quietly earned a big following even though, as her official bio puts it, she “lives as a recluse in her bedroom in Bend, Oregon.” The adventures she recounts are mostly inside her head, where we hear and see the kind of inner thoughts most of us are too timid to let out in public. Despite her book’s title, Brosh’s stories feel incredibly—and sometimes brutally—real.

Boko Haram

Mike Smith’s Boko Haram: Inside Nigeria’s Unholy War is a brilliant attempt to fill this void. It is the first comprehensive book to be written about Boko Haram and offers an excellent anatomy of the group, its emergence, its activities and the havoc it has wrought on the lives of Nigerians. The book also unpacks the dysfunctional nature of President Goodluck Jonathan’s regime. The current president’s predecessors are not spared either – nor is the country’s colonial past, the legacy of which is, in part, to blame for the fractured society from which Boko Haram emerged.

Travels with My Censor

Very interesting essay on the media landscape for books in China. It’s rare that you get insights like this.

The issue that once concerned me—the blunt portrayal of poverty—no longer seemed sensitive, because China had changed so quickly. “With the distance of time,” Emily wrote me, in 2011, “everything in the book turns out to be charming, even the dirty, tired flowers.” On the recent book tour, reporters often mentioned nostalgia, and the relentless pace of life in China made it hard to document details. “Sometimes in China you have this feeling of suffocation, and it’s hard to notice all these things”. Maybe because you’re a foreigner, you can be a little separate. Maybe it’s easier to be still. We have a phrase, yi bubian ying wanbian”—you cope with change by staying the same. “If you don’t move, then you notice everything moving around you.”

OODA Loop

Boyd’s ongoing theoretical analyses and discourses resulted in “Patterns of Conflict” briefings and the insightful and useful OODA Loop. Seldom has one man made such great contributions and engendered massive change through pure grit and determination. Ultimately, Boyd’s perceptions not only influenced military aviation but his “maneuver warfare” doctrines, adopted by upcoming officers, also influenced US Marine Corps fighting methodology at the very core.

Parasite rex

If you can overcome the horrors in this book (aliens is nothing), this is very very interesting. It’s likely that most species are parasites, parasites can control speciation, sex, move effortlessly from dinosaurs to mammals when the former die out, etc etc.
2022-12-06: A more nuanced view

“Among all known animals, there are more species that live as parasites than are free-living.” Parasitic life styles exist in all major animal groups, with the single exception of echinoderms, the phylum containing starfish and sea urchins. Parasitism is rife, too, among plants and, as you’d expect, fungi. Many organisms are what are termed “obligate parasites,” unable to complete their life cycle in the absence of a host—and obligate parasites include viruses, which, some scientists contend, aren’t even alive until they hijack a host’s cells.

Among the parasitic infections that affect humans, a large portion are caused by various species of nematodes, a phylum of worms. Nematodes account for 80% of all animal species and are so plentiful that, the authors write, one could “line them up end to end and have nematodes in every meter across our entire galaxy.” Envisioning a “parasite Olympics,” the authors award their gold medal to the nematode Ascaris lumbricoides, which has succeeded in establishing residence in the intestines of 15% of the human population, more than 1b people. The worm causes a tropical disease, ascariasis, whose symptoms include fever, abdominal pain, cough, vomiting, and weight loss. The success of the species comes in part from the fact that, unusually for a parasite, it doesn’t require an intermediate host—the way that malaria, say, needs a mosquito in order to infect a human. Instead, Ascaris is transmitted from person to person via contaminated feces.
Humans appear to have incorporated products of beneficial parasitic infection. The endosymbiosis theory holds that we may have co-opted parasitic bacteria that are now essential to life. Early in the evolution of single-cell organisms, bacterial parasites that were not destructive entered cells. These parasites ultimately became mitochondria, the organelles within the cell which produce energy—a structure essential to animal life.

Social solutions for addiction don’t work

there’s a solution to heroin addiction, but we can’t have it:

People have tried everything to fix drug abuse. Being harsh and sending drug users to jail. Being nice and sending them to nice treatment centers that focus on rehabilitation. Old timey religion where fire-and-brimstone preachers talk about how Jesus wants them to stay off drugs. Flaky New Age religion where counselors tell you about how drug abuse is keeping you from your true self. Government programs. University programs. Private programs. Giving people money. Fining people money. Being unusually nice. Being unusually mean. More social support. Less social support. This school of therapy. That school of therapy. What works is just giving people a chemical to saturate the brain receptor directly. We know it works. The studies show it works. And we’re still collectively beating our heads against the wall of finding a social solution.

an interesting, if overly optimistic a counterpoint, things are indeed getting less crazy.

Spam Nation

Fascinating writeup

But Krebs’s access to the inner workings of the spam underground was massively expanded when the 2 largest spam-bosses went to war against one another, paying corrupt Russian cops to investigate and incarcerate one another. Part of this war involved rival hackers breaking into one another’s internal networks and grabbing enormous troves of emails, chat-logs, and message-board databases that were fired off to law enforcement — and Krebs. From these insider resources, Krebs pieces together a gripping — and even, at times, thrilling — story about the strange business of pharmaceutical spam, an industry that is bizarre, sprawling, dysfunctional and contradictory. Fueled by world-beatingly high price of pharmaceuticals in the USA, the pharma-spam business uses millions of hacked PCs to send out come-ons advertising all manner of drugs, from anti-depression meds to fertility meds to powerful, controlled painkillers — and, of course, erectile dysfunction medication.

On the Road

nice takedown of a book that is way overrated.

On The Road is a terrible book about terrible people. Kerouac and his terrible friends drive across the US 7 zillion times for no particular reason, getting in car accidents and stealing stuff and screwing women whom they promise to marry and then don’t.