August 20, 2010 by Joel.

It is an interesting thing to read a book whose thesis involves less-than-benign impacts of technology on our brains while using an iPad to read that book.

I finished Carr’s book last week, and was favorably impressed. I’ve read a couple of reviews that were not enamored by Carr’s presentation, but I was not expecting an academic book. However, I thought it was a well-researched, well-written volume that carried an interesting message. His idea is that today’s modern information-rich environment and the way we process in our work and daily life is changing the structure of our brains. He reflects on his own abilities to concentrate, and relates the motivation that had in his desire to pursue this line of inquiry.

“Traditional wisdom” was that the adult brain was not malleable, but emerging views are that it is much more plastic, and in fact is “massively plastic.” Carr gives many examples of how we have been changed by our technological tools, from maps to typewriters, and extrapolates to the profound changes wrought by the massively parallel multi-tasking world of today’s networked computers and communication devices. Do the changes that allow us to cope with staccato tempo of the workplace and life in general make it harder to think deeply about vexing problems and knotty issues? Carr thinks so. Do the devices we use contribute to that?

Hmmm…maybe it’s a good thing that the iPad doesn’t do multi-tasking though as I’ve typed this post on the iPad I’ve referred to the Kindle version of the book, and looked up the spelling of “staccato.”

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January 26, 2010 by Joel.

Somehow, I’ve gotten to be 52 years old, and I think I’m a decent geek (I used to be a bit-twiddling systems programmer back in the day) as well as a Sci-Fi fan, and I managed to miss reading Snow Crash for 18 years (published in 1992). Oh well, no time like the present to make that up. I thoroughly enjoyed Snow Crash. I found the style and presentation to be interesting and compelling. I’ve read, over the last couple of months, Stephenson’s Anathem and Cryptonomicon, enjoying them both immensely. It’s clear that they are by the same author, but yet they are so different in characters and story that it doesn’t feel like rehashing the same ground. That’s important when an author spends as many pages telling a story as Stephenson . I won’t spend a lot of time here rehashing the adventures of Hiro and Y.T. There are a zillion reviews on the ‘net. What I will say is that this is a fabulous book, well worth the attention it has received. The amazing thing to me is that when I read it, though it was written and published in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, the computer/information technology described in the book doesn’t feel dated. Sure there are some places where you can spot some anachronisms, but they are so few and far between that it doesn’t detract from the story. I felt the same way about Cryptonomicon, by the way. So, go pick up a copy of Snow Crash if you’ve never read it; as a friend said to me on Facebook, good thing I finally read it so he wouldn’t have to pull my “geek card”

Now, one interesting angle. I’d been looking at eBook readers (and as I write this, I’m awaiting the announcement, in less than 24 hours, of Apple’s “iThing”) and had decided that I didn’t want to spring for a Kindle but I liked the concept. Then I saw that I could get the software for iPhone/iPod Touch (I have a Touch) and PC, with Mac and Blackberry on the way. Cool, I say, so I downloaded the software and forked out $9.99 for Snow Crash on Amazon (I know, coulda got a used paperback for $1). I really liked reading on the Touch. I did read a few chapters on my laptop (but since the Mac version is not out, had to use Parallels with a Windows VM ). It was useful, though, to be able to read the book in one window and have Wikipedia articles about Sumerian history open in another window (read Snow Crash, you’ll know why). I suspect I’ll buy more books this way, though I really don’t like the Kindle Digital Rights Management (DRM) and think that this is the main thing that we’ve got to figure out in the business model. I should be able to loan or give away the copy I’ve licensed, just like a physical book.

OK, y’all don’t look at any strange bit maps now!

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November 19, 2009 by Joel.

It’s been a while since I enjoyed a novel as much as this one. I did recently finish Jack McDevitt’s Priscilla Hutchins novels, and they were quite enjoyable, but it didn’t move me to blog about it. The book is extremely well written with fantastic character development, has an intriguing plot, and comes to a satisfying resolution. Fraa Erasmas (Raz) is a young “monk” (avout) living the the Concent of Saunt Edhar, a cloister of science, mathematics and philosophy. The earth-like world has a complex society made up of the secular inhabitants (living outside the various Concents) and the avout (living within). This society has a history of several thousand years, punctuated by cycles of world-ravishing societal unrest and collapse - but the Concents, at least some, have maintained the flower of knowledge throughout. This part of the setting reminded me of A Canticle for Leibowitz. However, the world is much more richly described, and the Terrible Events have not as much scarred society, as built it up, though they do make the same mistakes over and over.

Fraa Erasmus is thrown from his sheltered life into the center of a world-spanning adventure, as the inhabitants of Arbre react first to the hint of, and the actualization of visitation from space. The book is replete with interesting characters having learned dialogs, adventure, intrigue, love and family. It makes you think as you follow the philosophical discourses of the avout as they place events into their own contex, based on their affiliation. The end game, with a polycosmic universe and non-linear time is fascinating. It’s 900+ pages of great entertainment, and I need to read it again to pick up nuances I missed the first time through.

However, first, I have a copy of Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, his most well known book, to read this weekend on the plane to Buffalo…

Good stuff. Pick it up, you’ll be glad you did.

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October 24, 2009 by Joel.

I bought a copy of this book after seeing a reference to it on a mailing list to which I’m subscribed (the Flyfish@ list, for the curious). A quick trip over to Amazon and it was on its way. I’ll confess that the title sold it pretty quickly, though this book does explore a subject that interests me…the inability of centrist Democrats to connect with the “Red State” vote. Growing up in eastern NC and being within a decade of age of the author provided me a bit of affinity for the subject. For the past 30 years, however, I’ve lived in Chapel Hill, NC, which will skew your perceptions of North Carolina politics a little bit in the Blue direction . I thought reading this book would help me remember why there are a lot of Red folks in NC, and maybe give me a bit more insight into the illogical (to me) phenomenon that sends voters from economically depressed areas to the polls in droves, punting for the Republican candidate more often than not. These are the same folks that, out of concern over the possible policies of the then-putative Obama administration, bought guns and ammunition in droves.

On to the book…

I really enjoyed the read. I’ll confess that it got off to a slow start for me. The Introduction and the first chapter, “American Serfs” are, while descriptive, the area where I feel that I am the least in sync with Bageant. I do believe in capitalism (with appropriate regulation!) and I don’t think that globalization will be going away…rather than fighting globalization, we need to educate and adapt, and we need policies that support that. As the book continues, it resonated much more with me. This is where he delves into the cultural factors that influence the political leanings of the denizens of Winchester, VA. I thought that he did a really good job of describing, in very personal terms, the culture of gun ownership and use. Then, his chapter on religion, “The Covert Kingdom” was also good, and in particular Bageant’s discussion of his relationship with his brother, a fundamentalist minister. I thought his best chapter was “The Ballad of Lynddie England.” Here he talks about how the abuse at Abu Ghraib could come about, and the historical cultures that still have significant influences today.

Bageant’s key point is that to be relevant to this constituency, the Blue politician has to go where these people are and be a part of their lives. Technical, logical debates from afar may work with the classic urban liberal wing of the Democratic party, but in an increasingly complex and challenging world, having foot soldiers among the voters who can package issues in ways that are relevant to the lives of Bageant’s contemporaries is the key to success. Foot soldiers carrying the “Red State” vision are there today, and are being highly effective.

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April 10, 2009 by Joel.

Nothing like reviewing a book 52 years after publication. Well, 1957 was a very good year, as I was born then

This is a book that’s been on my reading list for a while. Somehow, I managed to avoid it in high school and college. I’ve been reading a fair number of economics books in the last couple years, trying to understand some of the things that are going on around us, and I felt I need to pick this one up. And “pick it up” is the right thing to say, as the paperback copy from Carrboro Branch Library was 1069 pages!

I won’t try to do an exhaustive review, as this has been done by folks with much more energy that I have! There are thousands of reviews on Amazon alone. I’ll just give a few of my overarching impressions. First, I’ll have to say that it’s a good read. There are parts that do get slow, but the characters are compelling and the story engaging. What did I get out of it? Let’s see…capitalism works to incent folks to work hard. Check, knew that. Government bad? It can be (and was for much of 2000-2008), but I believe in moderation. Let the innovators and industrialists who take risks reap the rewards. Check, even though I’m not one. Discourage rewards from innovation and industry and the economy goes to hell. Doh. Check! However, taxes are not inherently bad in my worldview (even though I’m filing mine at the last minute ), as sometimes people just won’t pay to maintain the “commons” or do things for common good (check this for a great explanation of the Tragedy of the Commons, explained with Smurfs). Provide a safety net, but encourage people to help themselves. The best use of taxes is education in my mind, but I digress…

I think that the most fascinating thing, though, is to have read this book over the past month (March-April 2009), given the context of things happening in the world economy, and reflecting on the different approaches world-wide to moving us out of this morass. It’s not quite the world of Dagney, Hank, Francisco & John Galt out there today, but it does make one think about the steps we are taking as we navigate through the “late unpleasantness.” I’m just glad our current president is a thinker who is willing to listen and learn.

If you haven’t read this, you should, if for no other reason than the fact that it has been so influential on many free-market thinkers. Gee, there’s that education thing again…

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December 25, 2008 by Joel.

One of the best things about the holiday season is having time to catch up on reading…

This is a book that I both thoroughly enjoyed and one which I found made me think. We all are products of our upbringing and the arc of our lives. I grew up in the South in eastern North Carolina with parents who were public school educators, not manufacturing workers. My childhood was a solidly middle-class one, and like Krugman, I benefited from the “Great Compression” and its positive effect on my family. I entered the work force in 1979 (right as things were tilting toward the greater inequality Krugman writes of) after earning a business degree at UNCCH — the late 1970’s and early 1980’s were a challenging economic time, but I found a niche in information technology that has served me very well. My success in this field has shaped my views on work. Race in politics is a subject that Krugman mines in this book; I’m of an age (51) that while I don’t have vivid memories of the racial upheavals of the 1960’s, I remember snippets of conversations and TV news, and growing up in the south meant that it was obvious that there was extensive prejudice. This is an area that Krugman states has a powerful effect on the candidates for whom people vote.

I’ve always considered myself a liberal, believing in social freedom, and at least to some degree the welfare state and its inherent redistribution of income. However, a business degree (followed by a computer science degree) and a change-oriented technological mindset has focused me toward an economic worldview of embracing change and riding the wave of progress. As my wife and I have often said, we don’t have many blacksmiths now; they’ve had to retool and find other jobs. Generally, I believe in free trade, and (here’s where my roots living in a “right to work” state come in) have had a relatively dim view of unions, though my wife’s family were union members, primarily in the tobacco industry.

Reading Krugman’s book was interesting and challenging to my worldview. His thesis is that organized and intentional politics have driven economic changes over much of the last 100 years, rather than technological change and globalization. Starting with the progressive movement of the early 20th century and the imposition of the income tax and the beginning of wealth redistribution, powerful forces have been pushing and pulling America. Absent the ability of interest groups to rule by fiat, this has played out through the “democratic” process in ways that make me put that word in quotes. A major effort through time has been to convince the public to vote against their own economic advantage through disenfranchisement, deceit, trickery and occasionally outright fraud. Krugman writes of the period from the late 1940’s through the late 1970’s as a period of unprecedented equality as several things came together:

• The institutionalization of New Deal social policies and the positive impacts they had on society
• The social “norming” of compensation expectations coming out of wartime wage/price controls
• The growth of labor unions and their effect on wages and benefits
• The “right place/right time” to be expanding manufacturing

This created an environment where America birthed a burgeoning middle class and a political balance that reflected this “middle of the road” balance. We weren’t as polarized politically as we had been before, nor nearly as polarized as we’ve recently been. Krugman believes that it is important for long term stability to have more income equality than we have we have today; the differential between CEO and worker is much more skewed today than in the post-war boom, and is even more skewed than in the Gilded Age of unrestrained capitalism.

Krugman’s best material in this book is his argument for universal health care. Other reviewers have highlighted this as well. He sees this both as the “right thing to do” (echoing Lyndon Johnson’s statements about the rightness of passage of civil rights legislation, even though it handed power to the Republican party for a generation) and a template for showing that government can be a positive force, thus diminishing the efficacy of the message of Regan and his successors and setting the stage for other government actions.

Krugman spends a lot of time talking about race in politics and the way that race has been used to co-opt people into voting against their economic interests. I think that he’s right that this has been a powerful force. Reading this book after the election of 2008 is interesting. I know that I personally worked harder for Obama’s election that I’ve ever done in a political campaign; I felt that strongly that it was right. I am optimistic about Obama’s ability to bring forward real change in the way we approach our problems.

Clearly, things have been moving in directions that reinforce income inequality and put unprecedented challenges on the middle class. Are the demographic changes that our society is going through enough to sustain policies that will help us to reinfranchise this part of society and help to defuse political polarization? Maybe we can look at what our neighbors around the world are doing — we don’t have a corner on good ideas.

I recommend this book…it’s a real call to action and participation in our democracy, to make a difference in the way things work.

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September 4, 2008 by Joel.

This evening I finished reading “Fooled by Randomness” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. This is, more or less, the “prequel” to his more famous “The Black Swan”. I read the 2nd edition of this book, the “trade paperback” edition, which included additional material in several chapters. This edition was released in 2005; the original in 2004. I loaned my neighbor my copy of “The Black Swan,” and she loaned me her copy of “Fooled by Randomness.”

I liked this book, and actually found it more readable and original than “The Black Swan.” This book covers much of the same territory, though not in as much detail, and is, as Taleb states several times, more of a stream of consciousness where he’s writing from his knowledge and perspectives, making observations and not worrying about producing an academic tome. I won’t attempt to do more an summarize his thesis, that we are biologically programmed to be susceptible to being “fooled by randomness” and his efforts to overcome the biases that this generates. Taleb is an entertaining and engaging writer. If you believe that randomness and chance, positive or negative (the metaphorical black swan amid the white flock) has a lot to do with life and success, you will enjoy this book. If you take yourself too seriously and conflate luck with skill, you won’t

Pick it up, and give it a read…

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May 15, 2008 by Joel.

One of the most enjoyable books I’ve read in a while is “The Age of Turbulence.” I’ll confess up front that I’ve always had a great deal of admiration for the seeming stability with which Greenspan ran the Federal Reserve Board, and while I consider myself a political liberal, my undergraduate degree is in business, and I think I absorbed too much capitalism to be an economic liberal. I’d heard that this book was a very readable peek into global finance & economics, and I certainly concur.

Greenspan starts the book with two chapters on his childhood and education, and from there goes into the beginnings of his career as an economist. I think there’s something I related to in his account of his academic years…he left his doctoral studies for his career and life. While I started graduate school after I began my working career and I did finish a Master’s, I left the doctoral program with the coursework behind me before starting a dissertation. The fact that Greenspan finished his PhD in later years gives me hope.

After discussing his schooling and his years at Townsend-Greenspan, he turns to his introduction to politics on the campaign of Richard Nixon, and then his work with and admiration for Gerald Ford. Greenspan went back to private life during the Carter administration, but was tapped for his Federal Reserve post by Reagan.

The book was informative on the workings of the Fed, but the parts I found most fascinating, personally, were the descriptions of the workings of the government and politics and their intersection with the economy. Greenspan was very comfortable with Bill Clinton, and found him not only engaged in and caring about economics, but understanding this and making good decisions. My take-away was that while Clinton indeed presided over the “dot com” boom, that this was not entirely good fortune and serendipity…the economic policies and decisions by the Clinton White House has much to do with this boom in economic history.

We all know the phrase “irrational exuberance” that was uttered by Greenspan in 1996 as the Dow charged ahead. I found it quite interesting to read the context of this and the way those words have become part of the popular culture.

The beginnings of the downturn in 2000 and the change in the presidency was a pivotal time. I found that Greenspan actually didn’t think much of Bush 43, particularly as he insisted on doing what he said vis-a-vis taxes and the economy, rather than adapting to the strategy warranted by the change in economic conditions, and that Bush 43 also did not try to rein in spending and maintain the balanced budget left him by Clinton.

His assessments of the other significant and growing world economies are quite readable and thought-provoking. America cannot be an isolated island. While de Tocqueville rightly attributed much of the early growth and stability of this country to its fortuitous geography, we no longer have that luxury. This is a global world and global economy. Decisions have to be made that are consistent with that framework. Globalization, as Greenspan says, is a positive factor “…all credible evidence indicates that the benefits of globalization far exceed its costs, even beyond the realm of economics.”

We must think about the future, Greenspan says. We have to engage the world, and we have to have an educational system that addresses the need to supply skilled workers to keep competitive and to help address income inequality.

This is an excellent book. Engaging, interesting and well written.

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March 23, 2008 by Joel.

This is a book I’ve wanted to read since it came out about a year ago, but it just made it to the top of my reading stack. I gave a copy to my dad for Christmas, and when he finished, it came back my way. A good deal

The subtitle of this book is “The Impact of the Highly Improbable” and Taleb tells a compelling story about our tendancy to ignore the unexpected. I’ll confess that I felt the topic could have been covered with fewer words (probably because I agreed with his thesis going into the book), but Taleb’s anecdotes are interesting, though I found the reading tedious at times. His hypothetical states of Mediocristan and Extremistan provide a nice framework for the argument…models and plans work in Mediocristan (a land of stability and central tendancies) but fail with the outliers, the fat-tailed (or bimodal dumbbell) distributions of Extremistan (a land of unpredictability). I’ve always been one who liked the first 80% of a problem or task, and got bored with dotting the “i’s” and crossing the “t’s”, and the idea that exhaustive planning is bound to fail in our real world of Extremistan resonates with me. Yes, you have to plan, but realize that you can’t plan for all the eventualities, and that planning and the execution of plans needs to be tempered with a knowledge that things just may pan out in a way totally outside your expectation. The Bell Curve may look appealing, but a high sigma event happens more often than it should. I liked his discussion of scalability…trying to set bounds is itself bound to fail. Why is a bound valid (except, I suppose, where there are certain physical constants that we don’t know how to move beyond…hmmm… sounds like an opportunity for a Black Swan!). The Fractal Randomness model is, as Taleb says, aesthetically pleasing, and allows us (through scaling) to at least partially anticipate the possibility of something so extreme (we are in Extremistan!) that it would have been a Black Swan, but is now a Gray Swan — at least somewhat conceptualized. Taleb says “…Mandelbrot domesticated many of my Black Swans, but not all of them, not completely. But he shows us a glimmer of hope with his method…”

So, if we can’t avoid Black Swans with exhaustive planning, what can we do? Look for ways to expose yourself to the potential of positive Black Swans, and work to mitigate the damage that negative Black Swans can bring. Expose yourself to serendipity, but beware the freak storm blowing on your house of cards.

A thought provoking book and worth a read.

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March 2, 2008 by Joel.

I recently read “The Big Switch, Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google” by Nicholas Carr. I enjoyed the book, even though I’m a technologist who actually thinks he understands a lot about how the Internet and its applications work. Carr does a nice job of comparing the “utilification” of computing with the conversion of the electrical power industry from locally generated and managed power points to the grid of today (though interestingly, we’re now seeing more “point” generation — personal power. Many technologies seem to oscillate between centralization and decentralization, just like computing). He highlights the disruptive nature of internet technologies and points out that utility computing and ubiquitous access will change the world and the economy in profound and not completely predictable ways. After all, many of the technology decisions of the early industrial age looked sound but were quickly rendered obsolete — technological obsolescence is not a phenomenon of the computing age alone.

Carr’s “big picture” approach is good for those of us who labor in technology, especially in management positions, to help us keep in our minds exactly how much we don’t know and can’t predict, except with 20/20 hindsight. This is also a good book for the educated layman trying to understand the macro-level impacts of computing on society. Carr could have speculated more on the economic and societal implications, but he leaves that as an exercise for the reader . While it’s not in the same league as Friedman’s “The World is Flat,” this book complements Friedman’s themes very nicely.

Here’s an Amazon link to the book…

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