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The Hydrogen Sonata.

By Iain M Banks.

I always get the feeling that Banks is never really sure how his books will end. There will always be one or two ideas that make their way through the full novel, but much of it feels like it was just made up as he goes along.

Having said that, Banks is a strong writer. There are always passages in his books that I love. My complaint is more that this could have been a great book. Instead it's a good book if you follow the culture series. That's nice.

The Hydrogen Sonata in this case is a bit of music created as satire—difficult to play music written for now other purpose than to mock other bits of music that were only written to be difficult to play. Over time the Sonata, much to the composers chagrin,  becomes the definitive piece of music whose only purpose is to be difficult to play.

The meta joke there—a joke taking over and having consequences when people don't realize it's a joke, is the real plot of the book. In this case what happens when the Gzilt civilization discovers that their Bible was a practical joke sent to them by a neighboring alien species.

 

Sometimes characters come and go for no good reason. I get the feeling that Vyr & Tefwe were meant to be the same character. That Banks discovered that  Vyr had too travel to too many places in too short of a time to be credible, so he created Tefwe.

 

 

 

 

Running

From 538

If we take this research at face value, we learn a few things. First, some exercise reduces your risk of death. Second, the optimal walking/jogging exercise is light to moderate jogging. The optimal speed is between 5 and 7 mph, and if you do 25 minutes about three times a week, you're all set. Nothing in the data suggests that running more — farther, or faster — will do more to lower your risk of death.

Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (and How to Take Advantage of It)

By William Poundstone

 

Poundstone discuss the many psychological features that impact how we decide a price. The writing is good, he covers many topics, who made the discovery, and the experiments made to test them. Overall, the book is a little disconnected though as there are many short chapters on related themes, as opposed to a few larger chapters that dig deep into a particular aspect of the subject.

 

Some topics…

 

Anchoring—the first price you see affects the price of a final sale, even if the first price you see was a random number.

 

Sliding discounts—Don't raise prices, reduce discounts. Instead of selling something for $99, set it's price at $149, and offer a $50.00 discount. Over time if your costs go up, or you want more profit, then reduce the discount, to $40. Next, raise the price from $149.00 to $159, but also raise the discount from $40 to $50.00. This has the effect of slowly raising prices, without spooking your customers.

 

People don't think absolutely about happiness. They think about it in comparison to other choices.

April 22, 1958
57 Perry Street
New York City

Dear Hume,

You ask advice: ah, what a very human and very dangerous thing to do! For to give advice to a man who asks what to do with his life implies something very close to egomania. To presume to point a man to the right and ultimate goal — to point with a trembling finger in the RIGHT direction is something only a fool would take upon himself.

I am not a fool, but I respect your sincerity in asking my advice. I ask you though, in listening to what I say, to remember that all advice can only be a product of the man who gives it. What is truth to one may be disaster to another. I do not see life through your eyes, nor you through mine. If I were to attempt to give you specific advice, it would be too much like the blind leading the blind.

"To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles … " (Shakespeare)

And indeed, that IS the question: whether to float with the tide, or to swim for a goal. It is a choice we must all make consciously or unconsciously at one time in our lives. So few people understand this! Think of any decision you've ever made which had a bearing on your future: I may be wrong, but I don't see how it could have been anything but a choice however indirect — between the two things I've mentioned: the floating or the swimming.

But why not float if you have no goal? That is another question. It is unquestionably better to enjoy the floating than to swim in uncertainty. So how does a man find a goal? Not a castle in the stars, but a real and tangible thing. How can a man be sure he's not after the "big rock candy mountain," the enticing sugar-candy goal that has little taste and no substance?

The answer — and, in a sense, the tragedy of life — is that we seek to understand the goal and not the man. We set up a goal which demands of us certain things: and we do these things. We adjust to the demands of a concept which CANNOT be valid. When you were young, let us say that you wanted to be a fireman. I feel reasonably safe in saying that you no longer want to be a fireman. Why? Because your perspective has changed. It's not the fireman who has changed, but you. Every man is the sum total of his reactions to experience. As your experiences differ and multiply, you become a different man, and hence your perspective changes. This goes on and on. Every reaction is a learning process; every significant experience alters your perspective.

So it would seem foolish, would it not, to adjust our lives to the demands of a goal we see from a different angle every day? How could we ever hope to accomplish anything other than galloping neurosis?

The answer, then, must not deal with goals at all, or not with tangible goals, anyway. It would take reams of paper to develop this subject to fulfillment. God only knows how many books have been written on "the meaning of man" and that sort of thing, and god only knows how many people have pondered the subject. (I use the term "god only knows" purely as an expression.) There's very little sense in my trying to give it up to you in the proverbial nutshell, because I'm the first to admit my absolute lack of qualifications for reducing the meaning of life to one or two paragraphs.

I'm going to steer clear of the word "existentialism," but you might keep it in mind as a key of sorts. You might also try something called "Being and Nothingness" by Jean-Paul Sartre, and another little thing called "Existentialism: From Dostoyevsky to Sartre." These are merely suggestions. If you're genuinely satisfied with what you are and what you're doing, then give those books a wide berth. (Let sleeping dogs lie.) But back to the answer. As I said, to put our faith in tangible goals would seem to be, at best, unwise. So we do not strive to be firemen, we do not strive to be bankers, nor policemen, nor doctors.WE STRIVE TO BE OURSELVES.

But don't misunderstand me. I don't mean that we can't BE firemen, bankers, or doctors — but that we must make the goal conform to the individual, rather than make the individual conform to the goal. In every man, heredity and environment have combined to produce a creature of certain abilities and desires — including a deeply ingrained need to function in such a way that his life will be MEANINGFUL. A man has to BE something; he has to matter.

As I see it then, the formula runs something like this: a man must choose a path which will let his ABILITIES function at maximum efficiency toward the gratification of his DESIRES. In doing this, he is fulfilling a need (giving himself identity by functioning in a set pattern toward a set goal), he avoids frustrating his potential (choosing a path which puts no limit on his self-development), and he avoids the terror of seeing his goal wilt or lose its charm as he draws closer to it (rather than bending himself to meet the demands of that which he seeks, he has bent his goal to conform to his own abilities and desires).

In short, he has not dedicated his life to reaching a pre-defined goal, but he has rather chosen a way of life he KNOWS he will enjoy. The goal is absolutely secondary: it is the functioning toward the goal which is important. And it seems almost ridiculous to say that a man MUST function in a pattern of his own choosing; for to let another man define your own goals is to give up one of the most meaningful aspects of life — the definitive act of will which makes a man an individual.

Let's assume that you think you have a choice of eight paths to follow (all pre-defined paths, of course). And let's assume that you can't see any real purpose in any of the eight. THEN — and here is the essence of all I've said — you MUST FIND A NINTH PATH.

Naturally, it isn't as easy as it sounds. You've lived a relatively narrow life, a vertical rather than a horizontal existence. So it isn't any too difficult to understand why you seem to feel the way you do. But a man who procrastinates in his CHOOSING will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance.

So if you now number yourself among the disenchanted, then you have no choice but to accept things as they are, or to seriously seek something else. But beware of looking for goals: look for a way of life. Decide how you want to live and then see what you can do to make a living WITHIN that way of life. But you say, "I don't know where to look; I don't know what to look for."

And there's the crux. Is it worth giving up what I have to look for something better? I don't know — is it? Who can make that decision but you? But even by DECIDING TO LOOK, you go a long way toward making the choice.

If I don't call this to a halt, I'm going to find myself writing a book. I hope it's not as confusing as it looks at first glance. Keep in mind, of course, that this is MY WAY of looking at things. I happen to think that it's pretty generally applicable, but you may not. Each of us has to create our own credo — this merely happens to be mine.

If any part of it doesn't seem to make sense, by all means call it to my attention. I'm not trying to send you out "on the road" in search of Valhalla, but merely pointing out that it is not necessary to accept the choices handed down to you by life as you know it. There is more to it than that — no one HAS to do something he doesn't want to do for the rest of his life. But then again, if that's what you wind up doing, by all means convince yourself that you HAD to do it. You'll have lots of company.

And that's it for now. Until I hear from you again, I remain,

Your friend,
Hunter

 

 

Happy Birthday Blog. This blog is now 16 years old.

 

 

 

The Complete Sailing Manual

I'll let you know how good this is after I learn how to sail. For now this was nice wish fulfillment.

 

 

I am a strange loop

By Douglas Hofstadter.

 

Hofstader has deep ideas about how the mind works. I think I get his idea about strange loops and their profound consequences. Someone really needs to explore this technically though as this book is too philosophical to be considered science.

 

He is a great writer, always able to explain a difficult idea with a interesting series of metaphors.

 

About two thirds of the way though the book, he discusses his wife's death, and if it's possible that part of the strange loop that makes up her identity, will go on living in his head. Or, is he just finding a way to keep her memory alive.

 

 

The Art of Meditation.

Meditation is a practice. What is there to say about a book on mediation, other than "Do it."

 

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Surface Details

 

Another book from the Culture Series.  It continues the tradition of having almost no links to the other books other than the background.

 

It also has a bit of a tendency to come across as a bunch of short stories all linked together by the same theme—virtual life, downloading personalities to avoid death and virtual hells.

 

There are some parts of the book that a really good. As usual, Banks just drops them and moves on to the next topic. I'm thinking here about section where Yime was on the Unfallen Bulbitan. The Bulbitan attacks a Culture ship. That sequence is very exciting. But it just ends. In fact, Yime could have been edited out of the book completely.

 

 

Use Of Weapons by Iain M. Banks.

I am slowly going through Bank's Culture novels.

Some thoughts on the Culture series. There doesn't appear to be an overall narrative arc. He uses "The Culture" as a background to tell whatever type of science fiction he wants. He doesn't have to recreate the universe when a new idea hits him. The Culture is big enough that many sci-fi ideas can fit into it.

Use of Weapons follows a man who the Culture has hired to intervene in wars of non-Culture societies to help them end with less bloodshed. Or maybe that's end to the Culture's advantage. Zakalwei (The protagonist) can never really tell.

There is much in this book as it alternates between the main-story, and the background story of Zakalwei. There is a lot of powerful and exciting writing in this novel. But the shifts in location and story line are very abrupt.  I'm also not a big fan of the final "Twist" With a good twist, you can go back and go over the clues that you missed. No so much here. The twist felt bolted on, like something that occurred to Banks at the last minute. Not something that was woven into the story from the beginning.

 

Redshirts...

This is the first book I've read in a while that I've really had fun with. It riffs on the infamous Red shirt mem from Star Trek—that the unknown guy with the red shirt is always the guy to die on an away mission. In the book, the red shirts realize what's happening to them—that one of them will die every time they go on a mission with the captain. They begin complex and funny schemes and plans to avoid away missions at all costs.

 

 

 

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Lafayette in the Somewhat Unite States

By Sarah Vowell.

 

The Revolutionary war got off to a rocky start. After rebelling against Britain for raising taxes, it was difficult to raise the taxes needed to pay for the army needed to fight that rebellion.

 

Along come the French and Lafayette. Looking for glory. Looking for discount ways to harass the English.

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Against the Gods

The Remarkable Story of Risk. By Peter Bernstein.

 

Over the centuries, risk has evolved from God's will, to something that can be analyzed and thought through. While much of the future is unknowable, parts of it do obey the laws of probability. Warning, warning… parts of it do not. You can't manage risk away. That has a habit of blowing up.  

 

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The Game Theorists Guide to Parenting.

 

This book looks at many common child rearing problems through the eyes of Game theory.  What works. What are the pit falls.

 

How should you split chores?

How should you split cake?

How do you decide what movie to watch?

 

The book points out that the common cake splitting strategy—one child cuts, the other chooses—can be used in many situations. One child creates two lists of chores, the other chooses. One child creates to piles of toys. The other chooses.

 

All of these break down with three or more children, though there are complicated ways you can deal with this.

 

The book also has a section on voting and it's pitfalls. When you are voting for more than two things, then there are many corner cases were less preferable options will win.

Fortune's Formula

By William Poundstone.

 

I very much enjoyed this book. The book is the story of the "The Kelly Criterion" a formula that calculates how much of your bank roll you should invest/bet in a situation given particular odds.

 

The book does have some weak points—it can be very fragmented since its filled with many anecdotes  owing to the surprise history of the formula. The book covers Information theory, gambling, the mafia, hedge funds and the efficient market theory.

 

The Kelly Criterion started out as a way to predict how much information could be transmitted over a given channel given the channels error rates.

 

This principle was used in the creation of card counting in Black Jack. The bright idea was too look a pack of cards as a channel of information, then counting cards affected the size of bets. That cards could be counted in black jack  had been known for years. What the Kelly criterion added was a mechanism that calculated how much your bet should change with each passing card.

 

The Kelly criterion can also used to calculate how much you should invest in different instruments in a portfolio of investments.

 

The book also spends a lot of time on  the Kelly criterion, hedge funds, and the efficient market hypotheses. Is the market efficient? Maybe not, but it's dam close. In the few cases where we can examine the decisions of an exceptional portfolio a few patterns emerge…

1.      Luck. The investor had the luck/foresight to buy a few stocks that grew exceptionally in the long run.

2.      Insider information.

3.      Sleazy tax & fee dodging mechanisms that blow up, or are shut down as soon as the dodge is brought to light.

4.      Extreme leverage that blows up in a crisis.

5.      Business makers—invest in a company that is undervalued but has potential. Not only does the Business maker buy the stock, but he also participates in the company by becoming part of the management and leadership.

 

There are strategies that are very robust and there are strategies that eat them selves up. Many schemes for exploiting market inefficiencies go away the more they are used. Hedge funds regularly struggle with this. They develop a strategy that produces great results at a small scale, but as they try to grow the strategy up, either others figure out out, or the cancel their own efforts out.

 

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The Prisoner's Dilemma

I'm continuing my tour of Poundstone with "The Prisoner's Dilemma" This is a history, Game Theory, the people that created it, it's use and impact on history, and a few simple games…

 

Stag Hunt. This is a game similar to the tragedy of the common. To hunt a stag, you need two or more people working independently. While you are hunting, there is no guarantee that you will land a stag. It would be best if you did, but it's long hard work. Now, if you take a detour while searching for a stag, and hunt some easy to find birds instead, then it's ok for you, since you've found a little food, but your hunting partner won't succeed.

 

Deadlock—a situation where it's best for opponents to keep fighting.

 

Chicken—Two people drive headlong towards each other. The one who swerves is the chicken. If neither swerve, then both die.

 

Prisoners Dilemma. Two prisoners are being questioned about a crime in separate rooms. Each is offered a choice… "If you rat out the person in the other room, then you will get a lesser sentence. The other person will get a long sentence." But, if both of you stay silent, then you both go free. Would you trust the person in the other room to not rat you out?

 

Suckers Bet—A dollar bill is put up for auction. You can bit any amount and bids continue until there are no more. The catch is that the 2^nd last person who bids also has to pay his bid, but gets nothing in return. What's vicious about this game is that if someone pays $1.00 to buy the $1.00, then it makes sense for the person who bid 95 cents to bid $1.05 to get the dollar, since he will loose five cents by over paying, but 95 cents if he comes in second place.

 

Iteration—the dynamic of many games changes if you play the prisoners dilemma, or chicken once, then the strategy is very different than if you have to play it repeatedly—the best way to get cooperation is through an ongoing relationship and not a one shot transaction.

 

With many of these games, chicken is the best example, it's the most unstable party who has the advantage. This is not a happy thought.

 

Tit-For-Tat. This is a very robust strategy for dealing with iterative games. Many strategies only work if they are secret, if other people figure them out, then they loose there value. But, Tit-For-Tat works well when everyone knows that's how you operate. It works well if everyone plays that way.

 

The one catch with Tit-for-Tat is that the size of the Tit must be the same as the size of the Tat. If the two are different (perhaps due to subjective judgement) then Tit-for-Tat can spiral out of control with endless tit's responding to subjective tat's.

Rock Paper Scissors

More William Poundstone.

Humans re terrible at being random. This has consequences thought our lives…

The game of rock paper scissors has patterns to it. Women are most likely to pick scissors first. Men Rock. After the first round, people tend to pick the thing tat would win over the thing that lost—its too obvious to pick the thing that would win over the thing that won.

Fake accounting records follow detectible patterns

Multiple choice—the right answer is probably the longest answer. You can only be right in one specific way. You can wrong in many ways.

I'm enjoying going though William Poundstone's books. His older books are deep investigations. His newer books are simple and more pragmatic. I wonder what drove that.

 

This is your Brain on Music

By Daniel J. Levitin.

 

Any interesting dive into the science of music—what is it? How to do we hear and perceive it? Why do we like it? How do we develop preferences? How do we get good at playing?

 

My notes from this book were more about music that I wanted to listen to, then things I wanted to remember…

Of course Kindle won't let me easily copy…

1.      Surprise Symphony by Haydn. Symphony #94 in G Major. Second movment.

2.      Sindig's The Rustle of Spring or Chopin's Fantasy Impromptu. The notes go by so quickly that an illusiory melody develops.

3.      Chelsea Morning and Refuge of the Roads by Joni Mitchel are great examples of non-standard tunings.

 

"On average, successful people have many more failures than unsuccessful people"

 

 

 

Labyrinths of Reason: Paradox, Puzzles, and the Frailty of Knowledge

By William Poundstone.

 

I must read more Poundstone. His books have great tiles like…

               Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (and How to Take Advantage of It)

               Fortune's Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street

               Rock Breaks Scissors: A Practical Guide to Outguessing and Outwitting Almost Everybody

 

This book was very interesting. It tackles the question "What are the limits of our knowledge. Why lays beyond" Of course an naive optimist would say we can understand anything. But that's not entirely true.

 

Poundstone explores age old puzzlers like…

               Are we a brain in a vat?

               The Voynich Manusript.

               NP Completeness.

 

So how does one prove that the universe was not created five seconds ago with all our memories the way they are? How can one prove that our brains are plugged into the Matrix?

 

The answers come from pragmatism. The theory that we were created five seconds ago, or that are brains are part of the Matrix, are not useful theories. They don't yield better predictions than a theory that the world exits basically as we perceive it.  So how do we know that we are not part of the Matrix? We can't really know that, but Occam's Razor says that idea should be clipped out.

 

Occam's Razor isn't a rhetorical short cut. It's an argument against entropy. The more complex a system is, the less likely it is to work or be sustainable.

 

 

 

 

 

              

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The Organized Mind

By Daniel J Levitin.

 

Put a key tray by the front door.

 

I read this book about six months ago.  Looking over my notes, I realized that I hadn't written about it and now I couldn't remember what it was all about. After going over it again, I think it's safe to summarize that this book is about the neurobiology behind why putting a key tray is a smart thing to do.

 

A few other things to remember….

 

1.      Organize your physical environment to do as much remembering for you as possible. Junk drawers are OK. If they get too large you need to categorize again. You also need a way to call out "unassimilated" items.

a.      A mislabeled item or location is worse than an unlabeled item

b.      If there is an existing standard, then use it.

c.      Don't keep what you can't use.

2.      Gricean Maximus about orderly cooperative speach…

a.      Quantity. Make sure your contribution to a conversation are as informative as required. Do not make your contribution more informative than required

b.      Quality. Do not say what you believe to be false. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence

c.      Manner. Avoid obscure expressions. Avoid Ambiguity. Be brief. (Avoid unnecessary prolixity) Be orderly.

d.      Relation. Make your contributions relevant.

3.      Think Baysean. Think statistical.

 

 

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Me, Myself & Us

By Brian R. Little

In Jan I wrote...

A deep discussion of personality theory, and how much 'we' shape our lives. What makes a hardy person? A creative person? A proactive person? I must read this again in a year.

Five months later while perusing through the new reads section of the library, I came upon this book again. I didn't remember it though. It looked interesting, so I checked it out.

I got Deja vu reading the first chapter. I had a feeling of Presque vu, I looked this book up in the blog, and found, that yes, yes I had read this book before.

This book is hard for me to summarize. Perhaps what I want to take away is that, of course we have our personality traits. We may be extraverts, or open to new experiences, or consciences, or whatever. Beyond all that, we are flexible. We can learn. We can grow. An introvert can act extroverted for a while. There my be a cost to this, but there is no harm. You can choose your response, especially if you are aware of who you are.

So, have a dialog with yourself. Reflect on yourself. Know yourself. Beaware than your default responses are not all that you are capable of.

The Fabric of the Cosmos

Time, as we know it, may not be experienced the same way by atoms and other small particles. The other way around, the cosmos as experienced by small particles, may be very different than what we experience. But, small particles do not live in isolation. When they get together, they create new things—like time for example.

 

There is a lot in this book. And as fascinating as it is, I'm not sure what to do with it. What does it mean to me that the world may have 11 dimensions?

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Dataclysm

By Christian Rudder

 

Black women don't talk about tanning.

 

This book is about some of the fascinating insights that big data can give us. Christian had access to many big data sets--- OK Cupid profiles, Facebook, Match.com, etc

 

IT raises a scary point—even if we guard our privacy, small leaks, perhaps by our friends, can tell the world much about us. Am I gay or straight can be learned as much from my facebook friends as from anything I reveal.

That, and that black women don't talk about tanning.

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How Stella Saved the Farm.

It's the job of the innovator to conduct disciplined experiments.

 

Innovation often has to be run as a second business within the main business from the ground up, otherwise priorities conflict.

 

 

 

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