Rob Pegoraro tries to make sense of computers, consumer electronics, telecom services, the Internet, software and other things that beep or blink through reporting, reviewing and analysis–from 1999 to 2011 as the Washington Post’s tech columnist, now for a variety of online and print outlets.
It's tempting—oh so tempting—to lead off a review of Samsung's Galaxy Note by mocking its enormous size. So I shall.
The Note is big enough to give me a sense of empathy for our toddler when she picks up our phones. Its 5.3" display is the largest I've used in a pocket-sized gadget since 1998's MessagePad 2100.
Lawrence Lessig's new ebook One Way Forward is one of the most exciting documents I've read since I first found The Federalist Papers. One Way Forward is more of a long pamphlet than a book. It's tempting to call it a "manifesto," except that it's so darned reasonable, and that's not a word that comes readily to mind when one hears "manifesto."
At the core of Lessig's reasonable manifesto is the corrupting influence of money in politics, a corruption that predates the notorious Citizens United Supreme Court case. Lessig ascribes to this corruption the outrage that mobilizes both Occupy and the Tea Party, and he believes that the corruption can't be ended until both the left and right realize that though they don't have a common goal, they do share a common enemy, and unite to defeat it.
To this end, Lessig has a series of extremely practical suggestions, legislative proposals that, individually, strike at the root of the corruption, and, collectively, could kill it. Most of these don't require any kind of constitutional amendment. All are designed to be passed through the nonpartisan action of activists of all political stripes, working together on ideals that neither should find fundamentally objectionable.
Indeed, the steps laid out in One Way Forward remind of nothing so much as Creative Commons, in that they constitute a set of principles and actions that we can undertake individually, but which grows into a movement the more of us join in, and that are designed to reside in a sweet spot that does not violate any dogma or ideology. This is Lessig's special gift, the ability to design movements around legal and social principles that use a series of attainable, independent goals to build towards larger, more powerful solutions.
A mere 62 pages, plus a few more pages of model legislative language and end-notes, One Way Forward is an hour's read and a lifetime's work. If you want to get a sense of what this is all about, visit TheAntiCorruptionPledge.org (a pledge for civilians and politicians alike to take against corruption), AmericansElect.org (a project to put a third, reform-oriented candidate on the presidential ballot in all 50 states, with the goal of making reform into a national issue in the 2014 election); and CallAConvention.org, a dress-rehearsal for a series of citizens' constitutional amendment conventions that may some day change Citizens United forever. For a broader outline, see Lessig's own oneway.lessig.org, and the organization he founded, RootStrikers.
We must first build a system to fund campaigns in which all of us, or at least the vast
majority of us, become the effective funders. Not through a system that forces one side to
subsidize the speech of the other, or that empowers Washington bureaucrats to decide
how much money each side has to run its campaigns. That’s the awful connotation that
typically comes with the term “publicly funded elections,” and it’s not what I mean here.
Instead, through a system that incentivizes candidates to raise campaign funds from all of
us, in small dollar chunks, and that effectively spreads its influence to all of us.
Here’s just one example: Imagine a system that rebated the first $50 of tax revenue
paid by each of us, in the form of a voucher—call it a “democracy voucher.”39 Voters
could allocate that voucher (or any part of it) to any candidate for Congress who agrees to
fund his or her campaign only with “democracy vouchers” and contributions from citizens of up to $100 per election. Vouchers not used would get returned to the political party of the voter—or, if the voter is an independent or chooses differently, to some other
democracy-supporting fund. At $50 per voter, this system would put at least $7 billion
into elections each year, more than three times the total raised in congressional elections
in 2010.
Call this the Grant and Franklin Project. As a system, it would easily and adequately
fund congressional elections. But it would be us, not the you-pick-your-fraction-of-the-
top-1-percent of Americans, who would be funding these elections. And, sure, the money
to fund this system would be “the public’s”—in the sense that the Treasury would write
the checks to back the democracy vouchers. But as with everything in the Treasury, the
Treasury got this bit of the “public” from us first. This system just rebates what the people have given the government, in a form that allows the People to make Congress responsive to them.
"I'm Not the Road" is the second album from NYC-based indie band Whisperado. I've been listening to it pretty steadily since it came out a couple weeks ago, with immense and ever-growing pleasure. Whisperado have a kind of rootsy, country feel, and the lyrics and vocals are somewhere in the sweet spot between Ry Cooder and Jimmy Buffet, with a lot of humor and a little pathos. As ever, I'm most fond of the uptempo numbers, like the Bo-Diddley-beat "Insatiable Sally," a kind of hymn to bad TV; and "Teenage Popstar Girl," which reminds me of the more countrified Violent Femmes tunes. But the whole album's a treat, and it's available from CDBaby as a disc or an MP3 download.
John Scalzi's Big Idea introduces Bruce Schneier's excellent new book Liars and Outliers, and interviews Schneier on the work that went into it. I read an early draft of the book and supplied a quote: "Brilliantly dissects, classifies, and orders the social dimension of security-a spectacularly palatable tonic against today's incoherent and dangerous flailing in the face of threats from terrorism to financial fraud." Now that the book is out, I heartily recommend it to you.
It’s all about trust, really. Not the intimate trust we have in our close friends and relatives, but the more impersonal trust we have in the various people and systems we interact with in society. I trust airline pilots, hotel clerks, ATMs, restaurant kitchens, and the company that built the computer I’m writing this short essay on. I trust that they have acted and will act in the ways I expect them to. This type of trust is more a matter of consistency or predictability than of intimacy.
Of course, all of these systems contain parasites. Most people are naturally trustworthy, but some are not. There are hotel clerks who will steal your credit card information. There are ATMs that have been hacked by criminals. Some restaurant kitchens serve tainted food. There was even an airline pilot who deliberately crashed his Boeing 767 into the Atlantic Ocean in 1999.
My central metaphor is the Prisoner’s Dilemma, which nicely exposes the tension between group interest and self-interest. And the dilemma even gives us a terminology to use: cooperators act in the group interest, and defectors act in their own selfish interest, to the detriment of the group. Too many defectors, and everyone suffers — often catastrophically.
Surfing the Gnarl is the latest volume in PM Press's wonderful Outspoken Authors series: a collection of slim, handsome chapbooks curated by Terry Bisson that combine essays, stories and interviews (I've previously written here about the Kim Stanley Robinson volume, as well as my own).
This one is devoted to one of the world's happiest and most mutated happy mutants, Rudy Rucker, the prolific mathematician, computer scientist and psychedelic transreal science fiction writer. Rucker's addition to the series is a very worthy one, with two very weird, characteristically ruckerian stories. The first, "The Men in the Back Room at the Country Club," is a quintessentially transreal story, a kind of shaggy dog piece that outweirds itself with every successive sentence, playing what Rucker calls a "science fiction power-chord" in the guise of an alien invasion tale. The second story, "Rapture in Space," is a drugged out sex story about the slackers who use a robo-caller-driven Ponzi scheme to finance the world's first orbital pornography video, and it, too, is a perfect capsule of what makes Rucker Rucker.
In between these stories is an essay, "Surfing the Gnarl," which posits a theory of literature that ties approaches to fiction in with the mathematics of complexity and randomness, and is an illuminating piece of literary critical thinking. As with the other volumes in the series, this one concludes with an interview between Terry Bisson and Rucker, in which Rucker is his charmingly oblique and uncompromising self on subjects from the history of cyberpunk to the nature of the universe.
I really like the Outspoken Authors series -- these skinny little books seem to distill the essence of each of their subjects into perfect capsules.
RJ Palacio's new book Wonder is a middle-grades novel about August ("Auggie"), a young boy born with severe facial abnormalities who, at the age of 10, leaves the safety of his parents' homeschooling and begins attending a New York private school. August has cleft palate, no cheekbones, asymmetrical eyes, and other deformities that are caused by a rare genetic disorder; he has spent his life going in and out of surgery, beating the odds and surviving. He is smart and engaging, but also sheltered, immature, and terribly frightened of human contact.
Wonder's story unfolds through a series of point-of-view jumps, beginning in Auggie's head, then shifting to his sister, his friends, his sister's friends, and then back to him. It is through this device that Palacio manages to produce a story of intense action and intense introspection, a series of interiorized monologues that show the frailties and foibles behind each of Auggie's trials and hurts. Thus, Wonder becomes more than a story about a poor disabled child who overcomes bullies to find acceptance in school -- instead, it's a beautifully told lesson in empathy that requires that the reader find sympathy for each of the principle actors in the story.
Palacio is a wonderful storyteller and her characters are bright, well-rounded and intensely likable. Wonder is a beautiful book that is full of sorrow and triumph, emotional without being manipulative -- highly recommended.
In 1981, comics writer Alejandro Jodorowsky teamed up with French comic artist legend Moebius and created a new French comic serial called The Incal, (allegedly salvaging a bunch of material Jodorowsky created for an aborted film adaptation of Dune). The Incal's story is barely comprehensible, a mystical, satirical space-opera that anticipates many of cyberpunk's tropes. But the story isn't the point of The Incal. Reading Self-Made Hero's new English edition of Incal is an exciting and delightful experience for reasons having nothing at all to do with the consistency or comprehensibility of its plot.
Rather, The Incal is a triumph of glorious, self-indulgent, eyeball-kicking science fiction high weirdness. Jodorowsky's plotting strategy seems to have consisted of making up the weirdest stuff he could think of, getting bored, chucking in a bunch of new, weirder stuff, and repeating as necessary. New plot elements are conjured up from thin air without explanation or rhyme or reason. No pretense is made to any kind of underlying physics or poleconomy or philosophy.
Instead, Moebius just draws the hell out of Jodorowsky's fevered notions, producing a strong and curious aesthetic sensation that is quite pleasing and a little freaky. The creators of The Incal sued The Fifth Element for allegedly ripping it off (they lost), and Fifth Element is a pretty good point of reference for what goes on in The Incal: innumerable stylish, semi-erotic, high-tech incoherencies sprayed at the reader at a furious pace, fast enough that the fact that none of it makes much sense hardly has time to sink in.
I feel like I should try to summarize the storyline here, but in truth, there's not much point. Wikipedia says "The story begins in the dystopian capital city of an insignificant planet in a human-dominated galactic empire. (The Bergs, aliens who resemble featherless birds and reside in a neighboring galaxy, make up another power bloc.) DiFool receives the Light Incal, a crystal of enormous powers, from a dying Berg. The Incal is then sought by many factions: the Bergs; the corrupt and decadent government of the great pit-city; the rebel group Amok; and the Church of Industrial Saints (commonly referred to as the Techno-Technos or the Technopriests), a sinister technocratic cult which worships the Dark Incal. Animah (an allusion to anima), the keeper of the Light Incal, seeks it as well."
And yeah, I guess that's what happens. But it's not particularly the point of this volume.
Marvel previously collected these comics in English, and then DC did it again (censoring the nudity and changing the really excellent coloring), and this latest edition from Self-Made Hero restores the colors and the boobies, as Moebius intended. It's very good, very funny, very odd, and awfully silly.
The sixteenth collected volume in Bill Willingham's long-running Fables series is Fables Super Team, and Willingham uses the volume to demonstrate his absolutely catholic approach to mythmaking and storytelling. The Fables, faced with an impossible fight, decide to plumb new mythologies to find ways of overcoming the odds, and hit on the idea of creating an archetypal, X-Men style Super Team. They hold tryouts, locate their miniature person, their giant, their vulpine berserker, and all the other necessary personas for completing the Silver Age formula. This is a lovely bit of inside-out storytelling, a sly way of calling our attention to the ways in which the earlier comics creators filed the serial numbers off the Old Stories for the raw materials to make their spandex-clad heroes. But it's more than a conceit -- because this is Willingham, who never lets it rest at a mere conceit -- and Super Team is actually a suspenseful and sometimes scary story about hopeless bravery and impossible choices. The literal Deus Ex Machina is a rather nice touch, too.
The Guardian's Jon Henley reviews Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength, a popular science/self-help book by Roy F Baumeister, "eminent American social psychology professor" and NYT science writer John Tierney. It sounds like a practical guide combined with a literature review on the lines of such excellent books as Daniel Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness.
Henley describes the book as a good mix of science, practical advice, and clear writing, which is pretty much right up my street, as is the subject-matter: understanding why it's hard to get your brain to do what you want to do. "Willpower" is something of a catch-all term, but in general, it's the source of all my pleasures and many of my sorrows: it's the secret to regular writing and good health, but it's also the source of a fixity of purpose that sometimes blocks out other considerations.
Like a muscle, it can get tired if you overuse it. Exercising willpower, but also making decisions and choices and taking initiatives, all seem to draw on the same well of energy, Baumeister has established. In experiments, he found that straight after accomplishing a task that required them to restrain their impulses (saying no to chocolate biscuits, suppressing their emotions while watching a three-tissue weepy), students were far more likely to underperform at other willpower-related jobs such as squeezing a handgrip or solving a difficult puzzle.
"The immune system also dips into the same pot, which is big, but finite," says Baumeister, "and, we are pretty sure, so does women's premenstrual syndrome. Having a cold tends to reduce your self-control, and PMS does the same. We get cranky and irritable, but it's not that we have nastier impulses – it's that our usual restraints have become weakened."
So best avoid trying to do too many things involving mental effort at the same time, or if you're ill. As with a muscle, though, you can train your willpower. Even small, day-to-day acts of willpower such as maintaining good posture, speaking in complete sentences or using a computer mouse with the other hand, can pay off by reinforcing longer-term self-control in completely unrelated activities, Baumeister has found. People previously told to sit or stand up straight whenever they remembered later performed much better in lab willpower tests.
The final way in which willpower resembles a mental "muscle" is that when its strength is depleted, it can be revived with glucose. Getting a decent night's sleep and eating well – good, slow-burning fuel – is important in the exercise of willpower, but in times of dire need a quick shot of sugar can, according to Baumeister's lab tests, make all the difference.
I am a huge fan of Matt Ruff's novels, so when friends in the know started to spontaneously tell me about how fantastic the advance manuscript they'd just read for his next novel,
The Mirage, was, I just assumed, yeah, it'd be more great Matt Ruff.
But this isn't just more Matt Ruff. This is Matt Ruff with the awesome turned up to 11. To 12. To 100.
The Mirage is an alternate history novel set in a world where Arabia, the United Arab States, are the world's historic superpower. It's Arabia that intervenes in WWII (outraged over Nazi incursions into Muslim North Africa), and after the war, Arabia partitions Germany and establishes a Jewish homeland, Israel, with Berlin as its capital ("Israelis" enjoy a special "right of return" entitling them to visas to visit Jerusalem, of course).
Arabia prospers, though it is not without its internal strife. A notorious crime-boss called Saddam Hussein earns a fortune through narcotics (AKA whiskey) smuggling, abetted by a tabloid newspaper publisher called Tariq Aziz; a hawkish senator called Osama bin Laden commands a secretive private intelligence service called Al Qaeda; and a clownish governor called Moammar Qaddafi is a sort of Sarah Palin figure, running a private fiefdom. On the other hand, Qadaffi is very good to Internet startups, like the group-edited encyclopedia called "The Library of Alexandria" (excerpts from this are sprinkled through the book, written in perfect Wikipediese).
But Arabia is a good place to live. A great place. Until a fateful day: November 9, 2001. That's the day that Christian extremists from the troubled theocracy America hijack four airliners and crash two of them into Baghdad's Twin Towers, triggering a War on Terror that results in widescale incursions on civil liberties, an invasion and interminable occupation of America, and a Gulf War in the Gulf of Texas as the independent republic is threatened by its looming American neighbor.
For Crusaders -- the Christian extremists who go on attacking Arabia -- 11/9 is a wake-up call. The insurgency spreads around the Christian world. As Crusaders are taken into custody by Arabian Homeland Security, they tell a strange story. They are all experiencing a shared dream. A dream of a different world. A topsy-turvy world. A world where a great power called America rules, where Arabia is a collection of squabbling dictatorships, where the atrocities of 11/9 happened on 9/11, and triggered a very different War on Terror. What's more, some of these Crusaders bear startlingly realistic artifacts from this strange world -- copies of an imaginary, long-defunct newspaper called The New York Times, military service records, Iraqi money bearing the likeness of the clownish mafioso Saddam Hussein.
It would be easy enough to laugh off as just another nutty conspiracy theory, except that the Crusaders are very sure of themselves. So sure, in fact, that they believe that this world, the real world, is actually a mirage ("The Mirage"), sent by the Christian God to punish them for their impiety. They must destroy this world to be returned to reality, the reality of America.
So goes this extraordinary novel, which transcends a gimmicky exercise in Arabifying America and vice-versa and becomes a top-rate war novel, a thoughtful and sly commentary on the war on terror, and a scathing critique of religious partisanship, all at once. This is no doubt partly due to Matt Ruff's extraordinary wife, researcher Lisa Gold, the best researcher I know (she was Neal Stephenson's researcher on The Baroque Cycle and other books). But it's also due to Ruff's sure and steady hand, able to steer a course through a narrow strait with mere parody on one side and tedious exercise on the other, finding the sweet spot right in the middle and coming through with a head of steam that's unstoppable.
This is one of those books that you read while walking down the street and long after your bedtime, a book you stop strangers to tell about.
David Weinberger is one of the Internet's clearest and cleverest thinkers, an understated and deceptively calm philosopher who builds his arguments like a bricklayer builds a wall, one fact at a time. In books like Everything is Miscellaneous and Small Pieces, Loosely Joined, he erects solid edifices with no gaps between the bricks, inviting conclusions that are often difficult to reconcile with your pre-existing prejudices, but which are even harder to deny.
Too Big to Know, Weinberger's latest book-length argument, is another of these surprising brick walls. Weinberger presents us with a long, fascinating account of how knowledge itself changes in the age of the Internet -- what it means to know something when there are millions and billions of "things" at your fingertips, when everyone who might disagree with you can find and rebut your assertions, and when the ability to be heard isn't tightly bound to your credentials or public reputation for expertise.
Weinberger wants to reframe questions like "Is the Internet making us dumber?" or "Is the net making us smarter?" as less like "Is water heavier than air?" and more like "Will my favored political party win the election?" That is, the kind of question whose answer depends on what you, personally, do to make the answer come true.
Weinberger starts with a history of knowledge, from the pre-Enlightenment idea of knowledge as something that is revealed by one's understanding of the divine, to the scientific method and the positivist notion that knowledge requires falsifiable hypotheses. From there, he moves onto the challenge of expertise and of the merits and demerits of a set of diverse, disagreeing "experts" who don't speak with one voice in their agreement about the world's true nature, and to a world today where the disagreements that always lurked in science are visible to everyone.
He explores the merits and demerits of "echo chambers" -- the fact that it's easier to get stuff done if you exclude those who question all of your axioms, and the risks of being swallowed by your blind spots when you do. But Weinberger is optimistic about the net's ability to balance out the need to agree with the need for disagreement. He shows how pre-digital media put artificial constraint on argument, forcing it to all fit within a set of covers and pre-empting the possibility of debate among readers and writers.
Moving onto science, Weinberger sets out examples of the amazing possibilities for amassing and synthesizing facts individually and as a group, citing huge scientific datasets like ProteomeCommons, run by a single grad student and comprising 13 million data files. He examines what it means to reach scientific conclusions when there is so much data, and what this means for the scientific method and the idea of falsifiability. If you can use data-mining to arrive at equations describing the relationships between different phenomena in the physical world, and if those equations reliably predict future actions, does it matter if you don't know why the equation works? And if it does, should you exclude that equation from the realm of science, especially if there's nothing else quite so useful to take its place?
But Weinberger isn't entirely optimistic about the net. It's "incontestable that this is a great time to be stupid," when "nonexperts" can create plausible-seeming bodies of "facts" to support anti-vaccination campaigns.
Ultimately, Weinberger treats the net as a fact, not a problem. It exists. It has remade our knowledge processes. It has bound together communication, information and sociability so that you can't learn things without communicating, and so that every communication brings the chance of a human encounter. In a closing chapter of recommendations, he talks about how we treat the fact of the net as a given, and work from there to try and use it to make us smarter. The concluding chapter is a set of eminently reasonable recommendations on policy, technology, administrations and mindset, expressed with admirable brevity.
Weinberger is one of the original Cluetrain Manifesto authors, and has been influencing our relationship to the Internet since very early days. As the net evolves, he continues to be relevant -- and indispensable. You can get a taste of the book at TooBigToKnow.com.
Old Ideas is Leonard Cohen's new album, officially released today. I bought it yesterday from the Amazon MP3 store, and I've been listening to nothing else, ever since. I'm a big Leonard Cohen fan, and it seems to me that this album represents a kind of distilled essence of Cohen, like a martial arts form conducted by a wizened master who reduces each movement to its sparest, most essential gesture.
Cohen's voice is so whiskey-gravelley here that he goes all the way through Tom Waits at times and enters Isaac Hayes territory, challenging the woofer under my desk. He's given up nearly any pretense of singing, and the best word for what he does on Old Ideas is "reciting," and this low-down-dirty spoken word is backed with pure and angelic female singers, which evokes Jennifer Warnes's classic disc of Cohen covers, Famous Blue Raincoat. The instrumentation is a bit of country, a bit of jazz, and stripped down to essentials: brushed cymbals, muted horns, a hint of klezmer clarinet.
The lyrics are as deceptively simple as the rest, at first blush just more of the Cohen we know and love, but the more I listen to them, the more I find myself falling into them. You can read the full lyrics here, and NPR is streaming the whole album here.
Under the Knife is the first collection of Brandon Seifert and Lukas Ketner's charmingly demented graphic novel Witch Doctor, which concerns th travails of Dr Vincent Morrow, a metaphysical epidemiologist who specializes in tracking down and eradicating transdimensional pestilences, ably assisted by Penny Dreadful (a possessed former art students whose internal demon feeds on pandimensional horrors) and Eric Gast, a paramedic who's learning the metaphysics trade.
Ketner and Seifert's sensibility is perfectly potty, and their titular doctor is a blend of Doctor Who and Spider Jerusalem. The metaphysics they reveal through the gruesome adventures in this volume has a weird internal consistency, but it's so cockeyed and frankly revolting that I can honestly say it never occurred to me before they scarred me with it.
This is a fine debut, and I can't wait for future volumes. Here's a preview of the first issue, and I've also included a few pages after the jump, so you can get a taste.
Having enjoyed the hell out of Distrust That Particular Flavor, William Gibson's long-overdue essay collection, I thought I'd try it on audiobook for a second pass (I really like to do this when I finish a book feeling like there's more there than I could absorb in a single reading). I was happy to see that Tantor Media had produced an unabridged, DRM-free MP3CD of the book, and they were kind enough to send me a review copy. I dragged the files off the CD and onto my phone and listened to the book for the next few days as I made my way from daycare to office to lunch to office to daycare (home to daycare/daycare to home were spent conversing with the kid, of course). At 5.3 hours, this is a pretty quick audiobook, and the narrator, Robertson Dean does a very good job on the essays, which are a treat to have as spoken word (especially the couple that are actually transcripts of speeches).
The MP3CD is advertised as "iPod-ready" and indeed, the single disc (shipped in a DVD-style bookshelf case) has an orderly, well-named set of MP3 files on it. This was awfully nice, though a little more care could have been taken with the filenames and metadata. Some files had curly-quotes in them that rendered in my OS as ’ and such; the reader's name had been put in the "artist" field of the ID3 tags, which meant that the files were misfiled; there was no cover-art in the ID3 tags. None of these are grave mistakes, and indeed, it's a treat to get an audiobook whose MP3s have any metadata or sensible filenames, but if you're going to go "iPod-ready" then it wouldn't hurt to iron out these small bugs.
Meanwhile, listening to these essays and experiencing them for a second time was quite exciting, as there were connections I'd missed, some of which will form the basis for some upcoming columns (I have two due this week!). A thoroughly recommended experience.
Nuclear Aftershocksis a new FRONTLINE documentary, airing tomorrow, January 17, at 10:00 pm Eastern. I watched an advance screener yesterday.
About halfway through Nuclear Aftershocks, a new FRONTLINE documentary about the physical and social fallout of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, it becomes clear that correspondent Miles O'Brien and his production team are really going to piss some people off. In the best possible way.
The first part of the program is a pretty straightforward timeline, walking you through the earthquake and tsunami that led to meltdown at a Japanese nuclear power plant. It's a gripping story, and includes some particularly heart-wrenching details—Fukushima plant workers scavenging car batteries in a last-ditch attempt to restore backup power, the Japanese paleontologist who spent 20 years trying to warn the government and industry that tsunamis of this magnitude had happened before and would happen again. At the same time, though, it's pretty straightforward stuff. You might have heard the information elsewhere, it's just better explained here.
What makes Nuclear Aftershocks different is the point when the documentary shifts gears, and begins to talk about what happens next. What does Fukushima mean for the future of nuclear energy? What happens if places like Germany and Japan shut down their nuclear power plants? How does the fear of nuclear meltdown stack up against the consequences of a world with no nuclear energy? This is where Nuclear Aftershocks really gets good, and it starts with one fact.
Japanese officials evacuated areas around the crippled nuclear plant where humans would receive a radiation dose of 20 millisieverts per year. With the exception of plant workers, there are very few Japanese who have received a dose greater than that. Twenty millisieverts per year is the equivalent of 2-3 abdominal cat scans in a year, Dr. Gen Suzuki, of Japan's International University of Health and Welfare, tells O'Brien. Then you get this exchange:
MILES O’BRIEN: At 20 millisieverts over the course of a long period of time, what is the increased cancer risk?
I just got through re-reading Tim Power's World Fantasy Award-winning 1996 novel Last Call, which is truly one of the triumphs of modern fantasy literature. Powers, one of Philip K Dick's three proteges (the others are James Blaylock and KW Jeter), is a tremendous writer, and his whole catalog deserves your attention, but even against the field of standout Powers novels, Last Call stands out further.
Last Call's premise, at its core, is that Bugsy Siegel built Las Vegas in order to become a living avatar of the Fisher King, but that he was prevented by doing this when a French mystic named Georges Leon assassinated him, stole his head from the morgue, tossed it into Lake Mead, and set about turning his sons into mindless soldiers in his mystic army by conducting dark rituals involving a handpainted Tarot deck that could drive you mad.
One of Leon's sons survives, though he loses his eye to his father's violence, and his dying mother smuggles him away from his father and tosses him, blindly, over the transom of a passing yacht on a trailer. He is found by a professional gambler, Ozzie Crane, who raises Scott as his foster son, and later adopts another girl, Diana, and raises her as his foster sister. From Ozzie, Scott learns of the gambler's mysticisms and superstitions: fold out your hand when the smoke gathers in the middle of the table or the drinks in the glass start to sit off-level, lest you buy or sell more than what's in the pot. Twenty years later, Scott -- now a professional gambler -- ignores Ozzie's pleas to stay clear of a game played on a houseboat on Lake Mead ("You want to play on tame water? Are you crazy?") and finds himself playing a queer sort of poker with 13 players and a deck of Tarot cards, playing (he later learns) against his own biological father, who has taken over the body of the game's host, and who is using the game to steal the bodies of more people so that he can attain true immortality.
This is a book that swirls with mysticism and resonances: everyday superstition, Sumerian and Egyptian religious doctrine, the Tarot and Carl Jung's archetypes, and the Arthurian mythos. Powers is clearly in some way the spiritual son of Philip K Dick (he certainly tells some pretty awesomely hilarious and terrifying stories about being Dick's confidante, driver, helper, and rescuer) and he's got Dick's knack for imagining catastrophically superstitious worlds where you're never sure who is the madman and who is the sage. He's also got Dick's flair for the bizarre, the sense that he's tapped into something very deep in the lived human experience of weird. But Powers is an infinitely better writer than Dick ever was: better at plot, characters and dialog.
Last Call is the first of three loosely joined books, the next two being Expiration Date and Earthquake Weather, and all three are brilliant in their own way, but Last Call remains my favorite. I caught up with it again via the audiobook, which is available as a DRM-free audio CD read by Bronson Pinchot (who is a surprisingly good and subtle audiobook voice-actor).
Tor.com has a sneak peek at Ashes of Candesce, the fifth volume in Karl Schroeder's astounding, heroic Virga series, about a post-Singularity civilization mining a pocket solar-system where the last pocket of human-comprehensible engineering knowledge has been preserved. This is hard-sf-meets-space-opera, full of big ideas and exciting low-gee, kerosene-fuelled pirate ships made of stunted lumber grown under an artificial sun. It's just the perfect mix of philosophy and action.
The rope that their ship had been following through the weightless air of Virga ended at a beacon about a mile ahead. This was a heavy cement cylinder with flashing lamps on its ends. Right now their flickering light was highlighting the rounded shapes of clouds that would otherwise have been invisible in the permanent darkness. Without the rope and the beacon, it would have been impossible for any ship to find this particular spot in the thousands of cubic kilometers of darkness that made up Virga’s sunless reaches.
“We thank you all for coming with us today,” the young thing was saying breathily. “We know the rumors have been intense and widespread. There’ve been stories of monsters, of ancient powers awakened in the dark old corners of Virga. We’re here today to help put any anxieties you might have to rest.”
“There.” The man beside her raised one hand and pressed his index finger against the glass. For a second she was distracted by the halo of condensation that instantly fogged into existence around his fingertip. Then she looked past and into the blackness.
Make's Sean Michael Ragan reviews an old-school Dymo Metal Embossing Tapewriter he found cheap on eBay and finds it to be an eminently satisfying piece of kit. There are modern versions but they'll cost you lots more, and this thing is pretty much indestructible so there's no reason not to buy a cheapo one on eBay.
But in terms of construction quality and durability, the Tapewriter is as far removed from those cheap plastic embossers as a Mercedes is from a Kia. It’s 10″ long, weighs almost two pounds, and is made almost entirely from cast aluminum, with steel fittings here and there, and all held together with machine screws. The only polymer in the thing, as far as I can tell, is a rubber friction coating on the internal tape drive wheels...
Embossed aluminum is pretty much the ultimate labeling material. Without wanting to be morbid, there is a reason why military services around the world choose it for personnel identification tags. Secured with mechanical fasteners, instead of adhesives, an embossed aluminum label will stand up for years against water, extremes of heat and cold, prolonged direct sunlight, and any organic solvent you care to throw at it. This is a true “industrial-grade” labeling tool, and if you can snag a used one for a reasonable price, you can expect a lifetime of use from it.
Douglas Rushkoff's graphic novel debut, "A.D.D." (Adolescent Demo Division) is a tight, action-packed comic wrapped around a serious, thought-provoking critique of the commodification of youth culture. The titular ADD is a squad of specially trained young video-game champs who are worshipped as teen idols. But while the lives of the ADD are outwardly full of glamor, and while they get all the video games they can play, they lead lives of intense misery. Hypercompetitive, locked away in a high-security compound, manipulated by the adults around them, the ADD live their lives in anticipation of "levelling up," a mysterious graduation that takes their best and brightest away to some unknown (but presumably wonderful) next life.
And of course, things aren't what they seem -- the corporation that runs ADD isn't merely an entertainment conglomerate, they have a secret agenda that's all about learning better ways to manipulate and control consumer culture. The details of this plot unfold to the dissident ADDers as well as the reader through a series of ever-more-deadly adventures.
Gutenberg to Zuckerberg fills an important gap in the published literature of the Internet: a fast, thoughtful, thought-provoking read for intelligent people who don't quite get the Internet. We all know these sorts of people -- often powerful and accomplished, but at a disadvantage in that they got their start before the net came along. These people struggle to put the Internet in perspective, buffeted on the one side by colleagues who reassure them by telling them that the transformative nature of the net is overstated; on the other by juniors, analysts and press who tell them that they're doomed unless they rebuild their lives around the net.
Naughton, a seasoned business journalist, sums up the big, important effects that the Internet has in a very quick read, placing them in historical perspective, projecting to their plausible futures, warning of their imminent dangers. From copyright to collective action, from governance to ecommerce, Naughton's book sets out, in reasonable, measured tones, the systemic underpinnings of the net's disruptive power, and promises attentive readers the theoretical and practical grounding they need to separate hype from hope.
The remarkable thing about Distrust That Particular Flavor, William Gibson's debut essay collection, is that it was so long in coming, collecting two-and-a-half decades' worth of nonfiction, opinion, travelogue, memoir, media theory, speeches, criticism, and miscellania. Because although Gibson disclaims any title to being an essayist -- he says in his introduction that writing nonfiction always felt like cheating on his fiction work -- he's awfully good at it. Even when the pieces are slight -- as a few of these are -- they are always delightful, exquisitely written, done to a turn with both insight and that unmistakable prose that is just shy of spectacular (Gibson once told me that he is averse to spectacular prose, it strikes him as premeditated and ostentatious).
There are many different threads in this book, but they converge on a few themes: one is Gibson's relationship to the Internet. He is, after all, the infamous creator of the term "cyberspace" who even more infamously refused to use email (he preferred faxes) until well into the net era, a man who is (falsely) reputed to use a manual typewriter in preference to computers. Another is Gibson's relation to technology, design, aesthetics and culture, from the underground rock scene he found himself in as a slacker in his early twenties to the gaudy pulp science fiction paperbacks he reared himself on to the ancient military firearm he found in his parents' attic as a boy. These threads converge in a pair of essays on Japan -- a place of futuristic aesthetics, forward design, and odd history -- an essay on Gibson's early obsession with eBay and the vintage watches to be had there, and in a transcript of a speech on robots, cyborgs and digital brains that is a moving piece of memoir shot through with prediction and technological insight.
By many standards, Gibson is a slow writer -- his book publishing career is 27 years old, and consists of nine and a half novels, a book of short stories and this collection of essays -- but he is a very, very fine one. His work has been seminal to many key moments at the end of the last century and the start of this one, and it is a rare pleasure to read his direct reflections on society and his work, rather than inferring them from his fiction. This is a fine and even essential complement to the Gibson canon, and a delight to read.
Adam Christopher's debut novel Empire State is a noir, Philip K Dick-ish science fiction superhero story about a pocket universe that's created when two battling New York superheroes open a vent through spacetime. New York City is reflected through this vent into the pocket, and in the distorted surface of the pinched-off bubble of reality, the city is reflected back in strange, existential form. The new city is called Empire State, and it is a grey, washed-out version of New York, perpetually shrouded in mist, perpetually at war, and the brave lads of Empire State are forever being wired into the bodies of robots and sent off in seagoing Ironclads, warships that never return.
New York and Empire State are imperfect mirrors of one another, and only a handful of people in either city know or suspect of the existence of the other. Some people are mirrored in the new world, versions of themselves that are either convincingly like the original, or their polar opposite, or something in between. The year is 19, nineteen years after the creation of Empire State, and the war slogs on, and the strange, violent bureaucracy that runs the city and persecutes the war tightens up the rationing and prohibition that make life even darker in Empire State.
This is a novel of surreal resonances, things that are like other things, plot turns that hearken to other plot turns. It's often fascinating, as captivating as a kaleidoscope, especially if you don't spend too much time trying to figure out the mechanics of the setup, the physics of the worlds. Just let it wash over you, the way that Jonathan Lethem's phildickian debut Gun, With Occasional Music does, and don't think too hard -- just feel it in all its weird glory.
This is a promising debut, and the publisher, Angry Robot, is pursuing a great promotion: WorldBuilder, "our way of reaching out to the fan creator communities, to invite you to come play in our yard." It's an official, sanctioned place where fans and pros can work together to create new media inspired by Empire State and its superheroes, hard-boiled dicks, traitors, madmen, cult leaders, and endless war.
I've been reading The Walking Dead comic series for years now, with the kind of sick, compulsive horror that is the mark of great dramatic tension in narrative. One of the surest ways to establish dramatic tension is to have a characters in bad situations who are trying intelligently to solve their problems, failing, and falling into worse situations. Key to this is that the characters have to try intelligent solutions to their problems, because otherwise the story becomes an exercise in watching a fly batter itself to death on a windowpane.
The Walking Dead is one of those zombie stories in which the intelligent solutions attempted by each character represents a kind of local maximum, the best action for that person at that minute, but disastrous in combination. In that sense, it's a kind of extended riff on the collective action problem, the age-old conundrum of figuring out how to work together for a common goal that will improve all our lives in the end, when there's always a good, immediate opportunity to pursue one's immediate advantage -- and when, at any moment, someone else in the group might seize on that opportunity and shut you out of it.
So previous volumes of Walking Dead have demonstrated the problems and promise of strong-man authoritarianism, family groups, nomadic collectives, fortress societies, limited democracies, individual autonomy, and every other variation and permutation, presenting the reader with the twin fascination and horror of watching a group of characters each acting (more or less) intelligently, but collectively behaving like a fly battering itself to death on the proverbial windowpane.
Now, after 14 volumes, we have the fifteenth Walking Dead compendium: We Find Ourselves, in which the characters finally, finally figure out how to work for their common interests, after years and years of slaughter and tragedy and horror. I read the book over Christmas, and it was like a holiday gift from the creators to their faithful readers -- a respite in the relentless grind that these infuriating and brave people have had to endure and that we've had to watch.
And of course, I'm already feeling mounting anxiety at the thought of what will befall this embryonic glimmer of hope in the volumes that are to come.
William Patry is no copyright radical. He's the author of some of the major reference texts on copyright, books that most copyright lawyers would have on their bookcases, books like Patry on Copyright. But Patry -- once copyright counsel to the US House of Representatives and policy planning advisor to the US Register of Copyrights -- is furious with the current state of copyright law, and he's marshalled his considerable knowledge of copyright and combined it with his considerable talent as a writer to produce a new book, How to Fix Copyright, a book that is incandescent in every sense of the word.
How to Fix Copyright is a superbly argued, enraging book on the state of copyright law today, one of the great evidence-free zones in policymaking, where every measure is taken on faith and whose results are never seriously measured (except by tame, partisan researchers who always conclude that more draconian laws are in order). Patry dismantles the arguments for "strong" copyright protection like a top chef deboning a fish, deftly carving away the industry rhetoric and leaving behind the evidence.
The evidence is grim. Bad copyright law, enacted on the basis of flimsy, cooked statistics (or worse, purely anaecdotal "evidence") is not serving to enrich artists, though it is funneling enormous wealth to their corporate publishers, studios and labels (especially the executive suites in those firms, where compensation in the tens of millions is handed out by firms that are "dying of piracy"). These laws are dismantling our culture, criminalizing our children and neighbors, attacking our cherished institutions, and distorting the progress of poor nations around the world.
Throughout the text, Patry offers two important (but rare) commodities: facts, and solutions. Patry's work is heavily footnoted, and his footnotes are generous, sometimes lengthy discursions, often citing primary, peer-reviewed works. Not cooked industry statistics, but impartial evidence from economists, social scientists, and creators modern and ancient. As to solutions, Patry notes that his publisher wanted him to include a list of bullet-point solutions at the end of the book, an approach he rejected because these aren't simple problems -- they're difficult and nuanced, and so are his solutions, so they're best couched in the arguments they refer to. I agree with this approach, though two of Patry's suggestions are simple enough: first, stop making new copyright laws until we know whether the current ones are working (we'll have to define what they're supposed to be doing first!); and second, make no new laws without a strong, impartial evidentiary basis.
Funnily enough, these two suggestions do mark Patry out as a copyright radical by modern standards. Copyright is supposed to be an unassailable doctrine of faith, and asking to see the evidence of supposed gigantic monetary and job losses due to piracy, or supposed gigantic contributions to the GDP and balance of trade as a result of the industries, makes you a loony heretic in the contemporary debate.
Patry currently works as Senior Copyright Counsel at Google, and he is also a clarinetist -- in other words, he is both well-versed in technology and an artist himself. This puts him in a nearly unique position among copyright lawyers, and it's no wonder that he's one of copyright's best scholars. And while How to Fix Copyright is a book full of anger, it's never shrill or strident (though it's a good deal less calm than Patry's previous popular law book, Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars).
I'm a lifelong fan of Rumpole, John Mortimer's grumpy, poetry-spouting criminal defense barrister, star of books, TV, and radio. John Mortimer died in 2009, and Rumpole at Christmas was published last Christmas season, but I missed it then. I just picked up a copy and inhaled it in a day, and I'm back to tell you just how pleasurable it was.
Rumpole at Christmas consists of seven Christmas stories, all published in magazines or broadcast on radio between 2001 and 2007. Each is a perfect little Rumpole tale, in which the grumpy, fat lawyer confronts and rejects modernity, exposes hypocrisy, drinks a lot of cheap wine, smokes many cheap cigars, and allows just a sliver of sentimental softness to peek out amid the murders and crimes. Mortimer's Rumpole is witty and rhetorical, his internal monologue a perpetual rehearsal for a jury he hopes to sway with sly humour, generally at the expense of authority figures, faddish trends, and propriety.
Six of the stories are short enough to read aloud around a roaring fire over whiskeys, the seventh, Rumpole and the Health Farm Murder, is just the right length for reading before bed. I've been reading Rumpole since I was a boy, and while Mortimer left us a mountain of Rumpole stories, they'll never be enough.
Joseph "Yellow Kid" Weil may have been the greatest American swindler of all time. The Yellow Kid operated in the gold age of the American con, from the late 19th century up to WWII, and became a legend in his own time, immortalized in such books as The Big Con (the sociological study of con artists that was the basis for the movie The Sting).
The first edition of "Yellow Kid" Weil, the as-told-by autobiography of the cheerful crook, was published in 1948. It was long out of print, but it was reprinted in 2010 by AK Press, and it's one of the most entertaining memoirs of the era.
Students of con games will know the basic mechanics -- many of which Weil claims to have invented -- and will know that some legitimate contemporary business practices, such as giving away high-priced premiums to sell commodity goods and stocking department stores with flashy, cheap goods that are priced as though they were being sold at a great discount, came to prominence as part of elaborate con-games and only later were institutionalized as normal business.
But the real, serious, high-octane cons were practiced with a cast from two to 200, using elaborate sets, timing and staging, and usually involved a faked-up plan to cheat on horse races, real estate or the stock market. This plan always went awry somehow, and ended with all the participants losing their shirts (as far as the mark knew, anyway -- in reality, his "pal" the con-man lost nothing and would split the take with the inside man).
Weil's autobiography is really more of a memoir -- it doesn't provide much of a coherent narrative of the man and his life. Rather, it is a series of unconnected -- but hugely entertaining -- anaecdotes about the various scams he ran and the venal fools he took for thousands and tens of thousands of dollars. Weil is a virtuoso exploiter of human foibles, and each story serves as a miniature morality play in which someone who thinks he's getting something for nothing (usually at some innocent's expense) instead loses everything as payback for his venality.
One glaring blindspot in Weil's narrative is Weil himself. He has practically no self-awareness, and there's virtually no sense of what's going on in his own head as he bilks and cons his way around the world. This omission is as striking as anything else in the book, and speaks volumes about how disassociated Weil was from his own ethics and morality. The final two chapters are the most poignant, as they are where Weil, now gone straight, accounts for himself and his deeds. He repeats the con-artist's shibboleth that he only cheated crooks who thought they were cheating others (though the book has plenty of contradictory examples he neglects to mention), but there is a glimmer of self-knowledge there that is all the more remarkable due to its absence elsewhere in the narrative.
This is one of the most entertaining memoirs I've ever read. Its episodic nature makes it a natural for quick reads -- a more perfect toilet-tank book there never was -- and the detailed descriptions of Depression-era cons are priceless, especially for anyone interested in gadgets and improvisation. The scam fortuneteller whose turban disguised a telephone clamped to his head, which was wired down his collar and trouser-leg to an electrical contact on the bottom of his shoe, which would be mated to a telephone circuit when the "swami" reclined on an "oriental lounger" to "commune with the spirit world" is one of the best things I've ever read.
Kopi Luwak is the most expensive coffee in the world. At my local specialty coffee bean store, it sells for $420 per pound—or $10 for a 10 oz. brewed cup.
Kopi Luwak is very different from that cheap, gauche coffee you and I drink every day. This is because each hand-harvested bean of Kopi Luwak has been artisanally shat out of the digestive system of a small Indonesian pseudo-cat.
Yesterday, my husband and I split a cup of Kopi Luwak in an attempt to figure out whether having cat butt all over your coffee beans really did noticeably improve the flavor, or whether this was all just an elaborate practical joke on the part of Indonesian farmers.
One of the things I enjoy about writing for BoingBoing is the opportunity it's giving me to learn how to write reviews of books. That's not something I'd ever done before I started writing here. And I'm only now getting around to experimenting with not only describing books I like, but figuring out how to talk about books I find to be flawed. Fair criticism is a difficult skill to learn.
That's why I'm sort of simultaneously terrified and in awe of this 1991 book review, published in the International Journal of Primatology. In it, anthropologist Matt Cartmill expresses his opinions about sociologist Donna Haraway's book Primate Visions. I don't know enough about either scholar, or the book, to have an opinion about whether Cartmill is right or wrong. But, wowow, is that a blistering review.
This is a book that contradicts itself a hundred times; but that is not a criticism of it, because its author thinks contradictions are a sign of intellectual ferment and vitality. This is a book that systematically distorts and selects historical evidence; but that is not a criticism, because its author thinks that all interpretations are biased, and she regards it as her duty to pick and choose her facts to favor her own brand of politics. This is a book full of vaporous, French-intellectual prose that makes Teilhard de Chardin sound like Ernest Hemingway by comparison; but that is not a criticism, because the author likes that sort of prose and has taken lessons in how to write it, and she thinks that plain, homely speech is part of a conspiracy to oppress the poor.
This is a book that clatters around in a dark closet of irrelevancies for 450 pages before it bumps accidentally into its index and stops; but that is not a criticism, either, because its author finds it gratifying and refreshing to bang unrelated facts together as a rebuke to stuffy minds. This book infuriated me; but that is not a defect in it, because it is supposed to infuriate people like me, and the author would have been happier still if I had blown out an artery. In short, this book is flawless, because all its deficiencies are deliberate products of art. Given its assumptions, there is nothing here to criticize. The only course open to a reviewer who dislikes this book as much as I do is to question its author’s fundamental assumptions—which are big-ticket items involving the nature and relationships of language, knowledge, and science.
Mark Siegel's Moving House is a picture book about a house that decides to keep its family from moving away by aggressively lobbying the children. The night before Joey and Chloe's family are to leave their house at Number Seven Carriage Street in Foggytown, they reminisce about all the things they love about their dear old home. The house stirs itself, stretches its legs, sprouts arms, and carries the kids up to a hilltop to show them that life in Foggytown needn't be so foggy. The kids, the house, the other buildings and the streetlamps conspire together to rescue Foggytown from its fog, and they move the whole place up to the top of a hill, and the house and the family are saved.
You may know Siegel's work from his wonderful Sailor Twain comics, and while there are some illustrations in Moving House that are very Twain-y, much of this is more straightforward, character-driven, kid-friendly illos (the house sauntering out of town with the kids in its hand is especially sweet). The writing is funny and charming, and the story is just weird enough, with a very satisfying and sentimental conclusion. It's a lot of fun to read aloud, and it's a great way to spark conversations about all the places in your home that are special to you and your kid(s).
There are lots of alphabet books out there. Matching a letter to an object and pairing them with a little bit of cute poetry is a conceit that goes back to the days when alphabet books were printed on a single sheet of paper protected by a thin layer of animal horn.
What makes the iPad/iPhone app X is for X-Ray different is its ability to feed kids' curiosity. Every alphabetic object in X is for X-Ray, from an accordion to a zipper, has had its insides photographed by Hugh Turvey, Artist in Residence at the British Institute of Radiology. (Which sounds like an incredibly cool job, to begin with.)
As you read through the book, you can turn the X-ray vision on and off, rotate some of the images 360 degrees around, zoom in on other images, and even put on a pair of stereoscopic glasses to see things in 3D.
Unsurprisingly, this gimmick works better for some letters than others. A flower, for instance, doesn't make for the most exciting x-ray to look at. Nor does a piggy bank. But the internal combustion engine more than makes up for those brushes with mediocrity. If you put the engine photo in x-ray mode and rotate it, the image comes to life. Suddenly, you're not just looking at the insides of a piece of mechanical technology, you're watching them work—pistons pumping and cranks turning. It's really neat and strikingly beautiful.
My main complaint with the app is really a complaint with app development, in general: X is for X-Ray is only available for iPhone and iPad. I don't own either of those things. If it weren't for the fact that Mike Levad, the app's producer, lives in Minneapolis and brought the app to me to try out on his iPad, I wouldn't even be writing this review. There seems to be a remarkable number of very cool science-related apps that aren't available for Android. I find that a bit annoying.
Tim Maughan's self-published short story collection Paintwork collects three of his stories, including the British Science Fiction Award-nominated story "Havana Augmented."
In an era of "post-cyberpunk" science fiction, Maughan is firmly cyberpunk -- or maybe "cyberpunk++," a genre that captures all the grit and glory of technology with a higher degree of plausibility and respect for real computers and networks than the genre had in its glory days.
"Paintwork," the first story, is a noirish, Gibsonian story of a graffiti writer in an econopocalypse-scoured Bristol, whose specialty is elaborate augmented reality animations that he inserts into the public consciousness by overwriting the QR codes on advertisements. "Paparazzi" is a story of gaming celebrity and global economics, with a wry and funny take on gold-farming that went to a place no other writer has ventured. The final novella, "Havana Augmented," is justly famed as Maughan's best work today: a political games/AR thriller set in Havana, where a bootleg augmented reality mecha combat game becomes part of the Communist Party's plan to liberalize the country's economy, and the young rebel gamers who are caught up in the plot.
Maughan has a keen eye for the fictional possibilities of technology, a good hand with the what if/ten seconds in the future mode of storytelling, and he's quite adept at filling his work with hyper-cool eyeball kicks. These stories are fun and thought-provoking, a great combination.
We review a lot of popular science books around here, but Sustainable Materials (like Sustainable Energy) is a popular engineering text, a rare and wonderful kind of book. Sustainable Materials is an engineer's audit of the materials that our world is made of, the processes by which those materials are extracted, refined, used, recycled and disposed of, and the theoretical and practical efficiencies that we could, as a society, realize.
Allwood and Cullen write about engineering with the elegance of the best pop-science writers -- say, James Gleick or Rebecca Skloot -- but while science is never far from their work, their focus is on engineering. They render lucid and comprehensible the processes and calculations needed to make things and improve things, touching on chemistry, physics, materials science, economics and logistics without slowing down or losing the reader.
The authors quickly demonstrate that any effort to improve the sustainability of our materials usage must focus on steel and aluminum, first because of the prominence of these materials in our construction and fabrication, and second because they are characteristic microcosms of our other material usage, and what works for them will be generalizable to other materials.
From there, the book progresses to a fascinating primer on the processes associated with these metals, from ore to finished product and back through recycling, and the history of efficiency gains in these processes, and the theoretical limits on efficiency at each stage. Lavishly illustrated and superbly organized, this section and the ones that follow it are a crash course in the invisible energy embodied in the bones of our built up world.
But the primary work of the book is to look at how small (and large) changes in our society and business could make important gains in the sustainability of our material use, an important subject as developing nations start to copy the rich world's insatiable appetite for material goods and titanic cities.
As with Sustainable Energy, Sustainable Materials is a valuable, impartial expert source in an important debate. While it explains the measures that can improve our materials usage, it also lays out the tradeoffs that these measures entails, the the relative benefits to be gained by each trade -- but it doesn't lecture or demand, merely invites the reader to consider the engineering facts and decide for herself what to do about them.
Delia Sherman's alternate history The Freedom Maze is really nothing like the contemporary and mythology-infused fantasy she is best known for, except that, as with Sherman's other books, the story here is subtle, nuanced, uncomfortable and brave.
It's 1960: Sophie Fairchild is 13, and her parents have just divorced. Her father has moved to New York, and her mother has moved to New Orleans to learn to be a CPA. Sophie has been sent to her mother's family estate, the last remaining corner of a huge plantation that once boasted hundreds of slaves and hundreds of acres.
Isolated and sorrowing, Sophie spends her thirteenth summer prowling the bayou and the overgrown maze her ancestors planted, avoiding her grandmama's wrath and dodging the issues of race that seem to be everywhere, in the midst of the civil rights movement's great surge.
But in the bayou and in the maze, there is a voice, a spirit or a haint, and it promises to take her for an adventure. Sophie has read that sort of book, has pined for magic wardrobes and Narnia, and off she trots, excited to have been transported back to slavery times, thrilled to see what awaits her.
But almost immediately, Sophie is taken for a slave by her ancestors, first accused of thieving and then assumed to be the unmentionable daughter of a disgraced and distant son who couldn't keep his hands off the chattels. And so Sophie is a slave, and she assumes that this must be her adventure, to experience slavery as it had been, to meet with her ancestors, to come to some greater understanding. Sophie, passive Sophie, sits back and waits for her adventure.
But Sophie's life in slavery is not an adventure. It's a misery, and a hardship, and an education, and as terrible as it is, it's not without its bright spots of camaraderie and even flashes of sweetness.
Gradually, Sophie stops thinking of it as an adventure. Her old life slips away. She forgets. She is a slave -- not a time-travelling kid on an adventure, but the slave everyone takes her for. And then the story truly begins.
The Freedom Maze isn't like other, similar stories, stories like Octavia Butler's tour-de-force Kindred. Sherman's antebellum story exposes a wide sweep through a narrow aperture, where the arbitrary nature of race and ownership, kindred and love, are illuminated in the harsh seeking glare of an adolescent's coming of age.
Mortality Bridge is Steven Boyett's first book since his comeback novel Elegy Beach, published last year as the 25-years-later sequel to his breakout novel Ariel. Superficially, Mortality Bridge is a very different novel from Boyett's earlier work, an existential horror novel about a man who goes to hell to rescue his lover, but like Boyett's best work, Mortality Bridge is a gutwrenching novel about loss and redemption, deserved guilt and betrayal, with an antihero whose quest is at once the stuff of cracking adventure stories and a tragic tale of facing up to one's own cowardice and weakness.
Niko is the antihero in question. Once a junkie rock-star who'd hit bottom, Niko signed a deal with the devil that rocketed him back to stardom, got him clean of his addictions, and brought back Jemma, the love of his life, whom he'd chased away with his doping and mercurial temper. What Niko didn't spot in the fine print of his diabolical deal was that his "chattels" were also forfeit to Hell, and now that Jemma has given him her heart, it has become his chattel, and so when Jemma begins a slow, agonizing death from cancer, Niko realizes that he has damned her along with himself.
Niko -- who has already been lost and redeemed once -- can't bear to let this come to pass. And so he formulates a mad and cunning plan to follow Death as he ferries Jemma's soul to hell, and there, he will play his guitar for the devils and the damned, and win back his love.
Boyett's Hell is steeped in mysticism and antiquity, borrowing freely from the Greeks, and Dante, and Bosch. Each turn in the underworld gives Boyett a fresh excuse to unlimber new grotesque phrases, stomach-churning descriptions of tortures too horrific to contemplate (though Boyett forcefully insists upon it).
Meanwhile, Niko's race through Hell is one of the greatest supernatural adventure stories of recent memory, surpassing Niven and Pournelle's classic Inferno (itself a very good novel on a similar premise, even if it does turn on the power of Hell to redeem one of history's great monsters). It is not a mere allegory about sin and redeption, cowardice and nobility: it's also a damned good story, which sets it apart from almost all existential allegories.
The Demoulin Brothers were the top of the fraternal order prank-gadget food-chain, publishing a secretive (but wildly popular) catalog that was distributed to lodge presidents and other mucky-mucks. The catalog featured inventions that could be used to terrorize (and delight) the members by simulating their executions, making them think they were to be horribly burned, and other delights of the simpler era when TV wasn't yet invented and radio was newfangled and untrustworthy.
Suits is a real scholar of those days, and she livens up the many reproductions from the various catalogs with great context-giving notes about the nature of these lodges, reprints from newspapers and magazine articles of the day that give a sense of their prominence and significance, and biographies of the mad geniuses who sold these gadgets for so many years.
From the demented copywriting in the catalogs to the fan-letters written to the company by excited lodge leaders who were delighted with the performance of the prank items, The Extraordinary Catalog of Peculiar Inventions is a time machine that transports readers to that gilded age and its highly specialized notions of fun and fraternity.
The Bippolo Seed and Other Lost Stories is a collection of "lost" Dr Seuss stories culled from short stories published in magazines like Redbook in the 1940s and 1950s, collected and reprinted for the first time.
The publication of a new Seuss collection is reason to celebrate in and of itself, and Bippolo Seed is more than a curiosity or a completist's collection of offcuts -- much of the material in this book stands with Seuss's best-loved work. The illustrations are classic Seuss and full of wit and irreverence, though the ratio of words to pictures is a lot wordier than the typical Seuss, owing, I suppose, to the constraints of the original magazine publication. If I had to choose a favorite from among these, it'd be "The Great Henry McBride," (MP3) about a young fellow who can't make up his mind on a single career and demands that the world accommodate his wish for excitement and novelty through his whole life.
Of course, pictures are only half the story with Seuss, an author who really demands that he be read aloud. Random House has released a companion audiobook featuring absolutely smashing celebrity readings from the likes of Neal Patrick Harris, Anjelica Huston, Joan Cusack (MP3), and William H Macy (MP3) (along with others), and you can really hear how delighted and honored the readers are for the chance to work with this material. I wouldn't recommend getting the CD without the book (because Dr Seuss's illustrations are so integral to the stories), but it is an indispensable companion.
The book is introduced by Charles D Cohen, "renowned Seuss scholar," who gives a wordy but fascinating history of the stories, providing some excellent critical context for them.
Max Barry's Machine Man is a disarmingly funny and light-feeling novel about an antisocial engineer who decides to create his own prosthetic leg after he loses his own in an industrial accident. Charles Neumann is an antisocial, technology-dependent scientist at a top secret military contractor's skunkworks. Dissatisfied with the prosthesis he is fitted with after he accidentally crushes his leg in a materials-testing machine, he sets out to create a better leg -- a leg that's so good you'd chop your own off to get it (this is also the battle-cry of the real-world open-source prosthetics movement). Which is precisely what he does.
What unfolds is a superficially simple, absurdist tale about a misfit geek who pursues a relentless and seemingly logical program of amputation and replacement. Barry uses this narrative to smuggle in a sly and insightful critique of the anti-human edges of the transhumanist movement, the place where transcendence of nature meets mortification of the flesh.
As with all of the best thought-provoking sf, Machine Man pulls this off without slowing down the action -- which involves some properly cinematic cyborg duelling and such -- and without sacrificing characterization. This is a really fantastic read and a thought-provoking one, too -- a great companion to such books as James Hughes's Citizen Cyborg.
Robert Venditti and Mike Huddleston's stand-alone graphic novel The Homeland Directive is a tight, suspenseful technothriller (in Bruce Sterling's definition of the term: "a science fiction story with the president in it"). Mysterious government spooks are hunting a pair of CDC epidemiologists. One is murdered, the other, Dr Laura Regan, is framed for a variety of crimes and barely escapes in the company of rogue spooks who spirit her away to a safe house. The story that unfolds -- a plot to terrorize America into accepting an otherwise unthinkable authoritarian rule in the name of fighting terrorism -- is taut, filled with great spycraft and action sequences. A great, paranoid read for the modern age.
Scored is Lauren McLaughlin's latest YA science fiction novel, a remarkable book about surveillance, class, and culture. It's McLaughlin's third novel, and her best so far (though the previous two were very good).
In Scored, the American middle class is no more, wiped out by economic catastrophe. Social entrepreneurs bent on restoring class mobility have established "scoring," filling whole towns with spy-eyes that watch kids' every move, publicly assigning aggregate scores to their behavior according to secret, self-modifying algorithms. The top-scoring kids get full ride scholarships to top universities, and are on their way to social mobility. Bottom scorers are frozen out entirely, while those a little farther up are able to find work in the military.
Imani LeMonde is a high-school kid in small-town New England, a poor kid whose parents scrape by with a tiny, marginal marina that serves the ultra-rich who holiday there. When the story opens, Imani is a "90," scored in the highest band of children, and on her way to a better life. But Imani refuses to cut off ties with her childhood best friend, a girl who has taken up romantically with an "unscored" -- someone whose parents have not opted for the surveillance system -- and her association with an anti-social element causes her score to plummet.
From here, McLaughlin launches into a tale that is simultaneously adventurous and thought-provoking. McLaughlin's characters -- a tenured refusenik social studies teacher, a crusading lawyer, a driven principal, and a collection of kids from across the score-tribes and outside the scoring system -- all serve to illuminate the pros and cons of surveillance and "meritocracy." McLaughlin is nuanced and delicate in her touch, and manages to weave in questions about caste, class, race and fairness as she explores her subject. She does great justice to both sides of the debate, painting an all-too-plausible scenario for the remaking of society around an idea of "transparency" that is optional in name only, as anyone who opts out is instantly suspect.
Most of all, McLaughlin captures the way that being watched and judged changes our behavior for better and worse -- driving us to do our best while draining our lives of experimentation and authenticity.
Scored is a book that will spark dozens of conversations -- conversations we desperately need to be having. This book is the antidote to the pointless hand-wringing about Facebook, reality TV, and the PATRIOT Act, a chance to get out of the trite cul-de-sac where these conversations always end up, and to move into green pastures.
Scenes from a Multiverse, the delightfully weird webcomic from John Rosenberg (creator of the transcendently bizarre Goats, is now available in book form. Rosenberg created Scenes as a more accessible alternative to Goats, whose convoluted storylines, while immensely entertaining (and mindbending) required quite a commitment to follow. By contrast, Scenes mostly takes the form of stand-alone one-page scenes from various parallel dimensions (though there are some multi-installment stories that revisit some of the deeper weird beloved by Goats aficionados). Rosenberg's humor blends science, high weirdness and pop culture in a mix that is not quite like any other, and I could read him all day long. See below for some of my favorite strips from the collection.
Lawrence Lessig's new ebook 
"I'm Not the Road" is the second album from NYC-based indie band Whisperado. I've been listening to it pretty steadily since it came out a couple weeks ago, with immense and ever-growing pleasure. Whisperado have a kind of rootsy, country feel, and the lyrics and vocals are somewhere in the sweet spot between Ry Cooder and Jimmy Buffet, with a lot of humor and a little pathos. As ever, I'm most fond of the uptempo numbers, like the Bo-Diddley-beat "Insatiable Sally," a kind of hymn to bad TV; and "Teenage Popstar Girl," which reminds me of the more countrified Violent Femmes tunes. But the whole album's a treat, and it's available from CDBaby as a disc or an MP3 download.
RJ Palacio's new book 
In 1981, comics writer Alejandro Jodorowsky teamed up with French comic artist legend Moebius and created a new French comic serial called The Incal, (allegedly salvaging a bunch of material Jodorowsky created for an aborted film adaptation of Dune). The Incal's story is barely comprehensible, a mystical, satirical space-opera that anticipates many of cyberpunk's tropes. But the story isn't the point of The Incal. Reading Self-Made Hero's 
The sixteenth collected volume in Bill Willingham's long-running Fables series is 
Like a muscle, it can get tired if you overuse it. Exercising willpower, but also making decisions and choices and taking initiatives, all seem to draw on the same well of energy, Baumeister has established. In experiments, he found that straight after accomplishing a task that required them to restrain their impulses (saying no to chocolate biscuits, suppressing their emotions while watching a three-tissue weepy), students were far more likely to underperform at other willpower-related jobs such as squeezing a handgrip or solving a difficult puzzle.
I am a huge fan of Matt Ruff's novels, so when friends in the know started to spontaneously tell me about how fantastic the advance manuscript they'd just read for his next novel,
David Weinberger is one of the Internet's clearest and cleverest thinkers, an understated and deceptively calm philosopher who builds his arguments like a bricklayer builds a wall, one fact at a time. In books like 
Having 
, my book about the future of energy in the United States, will be published April 10th.
I just got through re-reading Tim Power's World Fantasy Award-winning 1996 novel 
The rope that their ship had been following through the weightless air of Virga ended at a beacon about a mile ahead. This was a heavy cement cylinder with flashing lamps on its ends. Right now their flickering light was highlighting the rounded shapes of clouds that would otherwise have been invisible in the permanent darkness. Without the rope and the beacon, it would have been impossible for any ship to find this particular spot in the thousands of cubic kilometers of darkness that made up Virga’s sunless reaches.
I've been reading The Walking Dead comic series for years now, with the kind of sick, compulsive horror that is the mark of great dramatic tension in narrative. One of the surest ways to establish dramatic tension is to have a characters in bad situations who are trying intelligently to solve their problems, failing, and falling into worse situations. Key to this is that the characters have to try intelligent solutions to their problems, because otherwise the story becomes an exercise in watching a fly batter itself to death on a windowpane.
William Patry is no copyright radical. He's the author of some of the major reference texts on copyright, books that most copyright lawyers would have on their bookcases, books like 
I'm a lifelong fan of 
Joseph "Yellow Kid" Weil may have been the greatest American swindler of all time. The Yellow Kid operated in the gold age of the American con, from the late 19th century up to WWII, and became a legend in his own time, immortalized in such books as 
Mark Siegel's 
Tim Maughan's self-published short story collection 
Julian Allwood and Jonathan Cullen's 
Delia Sherman's alternate history 
Julia Suits's 
Max Barry's 
Robert Venditti and Mike Huddleston's stand-alone graphic novel 