Tag: books

The Substance of Style

this was one of my favorite books in the last 5 years, and it has aged pretty well. as more of our world is eaten by software, it will become both easier and more impactful to have good design.

From airport terminals decorated like Starbucks to the popularity of hair dye among teenage boys, one thing is clear: we have entered the Age of Aesthetics. Sensory appeals are everywhere, and they are intensifying, radically changing how Americans live and work.

We expect every strip mall and city block to offer designer coffee, a copy shop with do-it-yourself graphics workstations, and a nail salon for manicures on demand. Every startup, product, or public space calls for an aesthetic touch, which gives us more choices, and more responsibility. By now, we all rely on style to express identity. And aesthetics has become too important to be left to the aesthetes.

Iain Banks

The Culture represents the place we might hope to get to after we’ve dealt with all our stupidities: find and isolate/destroy the genes that code for xenophobia, should they exist. Plus we’d have to develop AIs and let them be themselves; another big task.

2018-02-07:

Banks’s conception of the Culture is driven by 3 central ideas. First, there is the thought that, in the future, basic problems of social organization will be given essentially technocratic solutions, and so the competition between cultures will be based upon their viral qualities, not their functional attributes. Second, there is postulation of Contact as essentially the reproduction mechanism of the Culture. And finally, there is the suggestion that the operations of Contact serve not just as an idle distraction, but in fact provides a solution to an existential crisis that is at the core of the Culture. This is what gives the Culture its ultraviral quality: it’s only reason for existence is to reproduce itself.

Book of Legendary Lands


new umberto eco!

The Book of Legendary Lands an illustrated voyage into history’s greatest imaginary places, with all their fanciful inhabitants and odd customs, on scales as large as the mythic continent Atlantis and as small as the fictional location of Sherlock Holmes’s apartment. A dynamic tour guide for the human imagination, Eco sets out to illuminate the central mystery of why such utopias and dystopias appeal to us so powerfully and enduringly, what they reveal about our relationship with reality, and how they bespeak the quintessential human yearning to make sense of the world and find our place in it

Superintelligence

this book is a welcome antidote to wildly optimistic views of the emergence of artificial intelligence which blithely assume it will be our dutiful servant rather than a fearful master. Some readers may assume that an artificial intelligence will be something like a present-day computer or search engine, and not be self-aware and have its own agenda and powerful wiles to advance it, based upon a knowledge of humans far beyond what any single human brain can encompass. Unless you believe there is some kind of intellectual élan vital inherent in biological substrates which is absent in their equivalents based on other hardware (which just seems silly to me—like arguing there’s something special about a horse which can’t be accomplished better by a truck), the mature artificial intelligence will be the superior in every way to its human creators, so in-depth ratiocination about how it will regard and treat us is in order before we find ourselves faced with the reality of dealing with our successor.

2018-04-26:

2019-08-30:

What if future AI looks a lot like current AI, but better? For example, take Google Translate. A future superintelligent Google Translate would be able to translate texts faster and better than any human translator, capturing subtleties of language beyond what even a native speaker could pick up. It might be able to understand 100s of languages, handle complicated multilingual puns with ease, do all sorts of amazing things. But in the end, it would just be a translation app. It wouldn’t want to take over the world. It wouldn’t even “want” to become better at translating than it was already. It would just translate stuff really well.

Shadow of the Swan

The Lord Alexand DeKoven Woolf was born destined to lead the Concord, the 2 System’s ultimate empire, but to prevent it from imploding into a Third Dark Age, he surrendered his birthright of power to become Alex Ransom, leader of the outlawed Society of the Phoenix, and in the process, he surrendered the one woman he has ever loved, the Lady Adrien Eliseer. But the Lady Adrien proves her love for Alexand with unexpected and breathtaking courage in Shadow of the Swan.

A Troublesome Inheritance

The word “Denisovan” didn’t appear nearly enough. Ashkenazim Jews may have sacrificed visual and spatial skills for other forms of (superior?) intelligence, but what about all the great Soviet Jewish chess players and mathematicians? And did the shtetl really have so many more centuries of capitalistic training to offer than did Istanbul? I’m not suggesting anyone is required to answer these questions, but once you start playing the generalization game — especially on this particular topic — one ought to spend a lot of time picking up or at least recognizing all these loose ends and indeed there are many of them.

Think Like a Freak

In one of the many wonderful moments in Think Like a Freak, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner ask the question: Who is easier to fool—kids or adults? The obvious answer, of course, is kids. The cliché is about taking candy from a baby, not a grown man. But instead of accepting conventional wisdom as fact, the 2 sit down with the magician Alex Stone—someone in the business of fooling people—and ask him what he thinks. And his answer? Adults.

First cellular automaton?

But given that the Vigenčre cipher was viewed as uncrackable, was there a perceived need for anything else? I suspect that the urge to invent new encryption methods has always been strong: if you have a cool idea based on your own field of expertise, you will suggest it (after all, if you cannot break it, it must be unbreakable!). In fact, the use of a transformation of the previous column seems to be like an autokey cipher. The first real autokey cipher was suggested ion 1556 by Cardano in De Subtilitate, but the first useful on was invented in 1564 by Giovan Battista Bellaso. Vigenčre published one in 1586. Liber Soyga was mentioned by Dee in 1583. Could the Soyga automaton be the result of somebody working on an autokey method, perhaps getting the bright idea of applying it again and again to itself? It would seem to fit into the time. Of course, the border between cryptography and angelic communication might have been blurry. Maybe the tables were seen as both. Sufficiently advanced cryptography is indistinguishable from magic.