Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in treasureeverywh's LiveJournal:

[ << Previous 20 ]

Saturday, December 4th, 2010
9:14 am	The Ship - C. S. Forester Fascinating account of one battle as experienced by selected crew members of a British light cruiser which was part of a naval escort of a supply convoy to Malta at a critical juncture of WW II. Each chapter has a small quote from the ships log which is then elaborated upon by the chapter. We meet a variety of ships personnel, learn something of their personality and history and how they came to be in the navy and how being in the navy affected them and suited them. Some are cads but each seems to have a unique skill that suits them for their role. Only one useless man whose potential for damage is mitigated by giving him a necessary task that requires only brawn and mindless repetition. Forester was a writer before the war and then entered the Ministry of Information and sailed with the Navy during the war to gather material for this book. It does have the flavour of boosterism, essentially a highly readable 100 page elaboration on Nelson's famous "England expects that every man shall do his duty" with a paean to the spirit of the British Nay and her sailors. But it's working, I'm defnitely rooting for the Brits to sink the "EyTie" ships. It does not paper over the death and stench and fearful pain experienced by the sailors except in so far as it keeps reminding us that the sailors bravely perform their duty with nary a shirker amongst them. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
9:07 am	FreedmanBrainmakers: How Scientists are Moving Beyond Computers to Create a Rival to the Human Brain It must be pointed out that this book was written in 1995! So, easy to see that many of the predictions of stuff that is around the corner are wrong. The main premise is that though flight succeeded when inventors stopped trying to imitate birds, for AI, the reverse is true, success will come as we imitate the way nature does things. There follows a discussion of robotic motion and AI. The 2 primary tools from nature are neural networks, both in silicon and attempts to grow cells as well as evolution in the form of genetic algorithms. With hindsight and having done some research in the area damped down some of the enthusiasm I might have felt about the sense of imminency conveyed in this book. In the end I asked myself why I keep trying to read nonfiction. This was a book written by a journalist and occasionally I had the sense that he was parroting things told him by the scientists with whom he'd spoken without real understanding. Especially when he said things that were more generically true about a field as if they were specifically true about the scientist in question. I wonder if I'd be happier sticking to science books written by scientists themselves. But then they can be such dreadful writers. I guess I should stick to the counterexamples. (Comment on this)
Thursday, November 11th, 2010
8:02 am	So Disdained – Nevil Shute Pleasant little read. Very English moral, patriotism stems from love of family, friends and one’s neighbourhood. One puts one’s friends ahead of the law and one’s country unless there is a clear and present danger to the country. The stylistic touches were deft. Very light foreshadowing that all would come out well. Interesting glimpse into the world of England and it’s minor country gentry between the wars. Also into how WW I flying aces had little to do as the airline business was slow to take off. (Comment on this)
Thursday, October 7th, 2010
9:44 pm	Use of Weapons – Iain Banks Somewhat surprising that I hadn’t read this early Culture novel before. I enjoyed it but not as much as some of the other Culture novels. The bombastic growing catastrophe scene was not as grand as the one involving a train in another novel. The satisfaction stemming from the overwhelming superiority of the Culture allowing it to win victories for good without breaking out a sweat not as palpable. What as somewhat superior was the moral dilemma stemming from the fact that meddling in affairs to minimize damage (read death of millions) was both a) full of risk that the opposite of the intended effect might occur and b) sometimes involved helping the wicked against the good, moral calculus at it’s most extreme. There was a riveting good surprise at the end though. (Comment on this)
Saturday, September 18th, 2010
5:38 pm	Rainbow's End - Vernor Vinge Decent read. Nearish future, ubiquitous computing means all objects are talking to the network, humans wear a small contact that talks to wearable computers and provides vr views of the world. For example a small gesture will let you "see" where all the power points are in a room. Plot is a spy thriller with the classic, "I need to protect the world from the baddies by getting full control. However, some good guys are close to discovering my plan and much as I admire them I have to eliminate them so that they don't foil me." A bit of tired idea but slightly more complex than most variants this time. Another theme is personal jerk reforms as a result of interactions with his granddaughter. Time to read some more Vinge. But not before the oldish but unread Banks I got my hands on. (Comment on this)
Sunday, September 5th, 2010
11:10 am	Ariely - The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home The title is definitely an overstatement. Yes he examines irrationality, at least what an economist might consider irrational. Be he doesn't always find upsides, or at least not much of one. The book is essentially a discussion of a number of studies he's done with others. The treatment of each study typically includes a personal anecdote of why he got interested, an overview of the experimental design, a story of how a couple of participants were selected and how they responded followed by a high level summary of the results. Possibly the most surprising finding is that mega-bonuses can have the opposite to the desired effect, ie reduce performance as the recipient worries too much about whether they'll achieve the bonus reducing the clarity and innovation of their thinking. The real way to motivate people, as I read in so many other places is to make sure they're aware of the significance of their work and that their contribution is recognized and appreciated. As usual, I wish I'd read some fiction instead. (Comment on this)
Saturday, August 14th, 2010
4:56 pm	Noah's Compass - Anne Tyler Pleasant read. In her signature style you get to know a person in all his complexity fairly well who's bumbling through life with a significant character weakness which is disenriching (sorry, my brain won't supply the proper antonym to enriching) his life. He meets and falls in love with another woman, Eunice, which has some complexities around their age different (he 60, she 38) and the fact that his 17 year old daughter has moved in with him so that they have difficulty finding time alone. Then his life is torn apart when he discovers that she's married since his father left for another woman when he was very young so he's completely unwilling to tear apart Eunice's marriage. Many people suggest that he should do it for his own happiness and he comes close to doing so but in the end doesn't and instead starts to engage with his kids and ex-wife, a more likely route to happiness. Tyler had a very similar story where a passive quite man left his passionate and somewhat shallow wife for a woman just like himself. The conclusion of that novel had him becoming aware that this had been a mistake. Tyler does a lovely job of using incidents in the story as metaphors for the larger arc of the story. Noah, of course, didn't have a compass or even a rudder because he wasn't actually trying to get anywhere. Early on the main character is attacked by an intruder and he has no memory of the incident. He's obsessed with trying to regain memory of the incident while in the larger story of his life he's missing many memories of his life as father and husband. The last paragraph of the story points out that the wounds to his head are healing quite nicely as are the gaping holes in his emotional life. (Comment on this)
Monday, August 2nd, 2010
12:06 pm	Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design – Stephen C Meyer The author has a Ph.D. in philosophy of science, which is what spurred me on to read something I wouldn’t ordinarily be interested in. I’m rather glad I did. He starts with a history of the discovery of DNA, which is interesting because it shows that Crick and Watson were just a step along the way. Their results depended on earlier results and left much unknown. My gut feeling is that Einstein’s leap was much bigger (can’t really comment on Newton’s because I’ve never really read any of the history of it). He also does a nice job of discussing the philosophy of science issues around evolution. In particular, explaining past events can’t really rely on the usual touchstones of reproducible experiments and predictive power. He spends some time explaining what abductive reasoning is (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abductive_reasoning) and how it’s the form of reasoning required to do history, legal reasoning and evolution. He presents a convincing case that the cellular system (my terminology not his) (proteins + RNA + DNA) is too complex to have come about either through chance or evolution since they both need each other present to do their job. He then explores attempts to find simpler systems that could be a step towards the cellular system. There are no satisfactory such systems at present (though he required lots of pages to reach this conclusion I think the result isn't to controversial unless you're worried about the consequences of the conclusion). However, I’m queasy about locating the hand of God in this because it’s dangerous to locate God in the gaps of scientific knowledge. Scientists just keep figuring more stuff out. Just because they haven’t found an intermediate step yet doesn’t mean that they won’t eventually. There are also several chapters pointing out that any attempt to draw demarcation lines that have evolution on the science side and intelligent design on the non-science side fail. This wasn’t surprising to me since such demarcation lines are very hard to draw and often either cut out real science or allow in stuff like crypto-zoology or psi research that are clearly to me not science. So this isn’t an important issue to me but clearly is to many others given its use in the battles over education in the US. Finally, he deals with the big reduction problem. People who don’t believe in intelligent designers have the big problem of how life originated to which they as yet have no good account. But they counter that intelligent design locates the problem of where life originates with an intelligent designer. But where did he/she come from? Is believing in God require more credulity than believing that life came about without a designer. Obviously God came about without a designer. Back to the irreducible mystery of why there is something rather than nothing. If I think about this too much my head hurts. I still prefer to found my belief in God and Christianity in the reasonings of C. S. Lewis and Tom Wright not in how the universe came into being. (Comment on this)
11:28 am	Good to a Fault – Marina Endicott What a lovely book. Main characters doing the right thing through many false steps. Other characters behaving obnoxiously in ways that pain and trouble the main characters without bringing them down. Life with children described in all its messy glory of annoyance, exhaustion, love and joy. Just read it. Here’s an example of a lovely use of an incident as a metaphor. Not all men are like the drop of mercury but some are, as was one in the story just before this description of an event from the main character’s time with her father. “He called her in to watch a bead of mercury slipping away from him along the shiny floorboards. You remember a thing and reach to pluck it closer, but it slides off as if it’s heard you coming. Only it leaves a residue on your fingers, mercury, much as you might think it did not. Dangerous, her father had said, even as he casually chased the bead across the floor.” It was only towards the end that I realized that, one of the characters, Darwin, was something like an analog for the Holy Spirit. He showed up early on and helped out in a variety of unexpected ways. This passage should have been sufficient to alert me but only had its full impact on my understanding later. “Darwin walked up, still slow, not barging in. ‘How’s Lorraine?’ Her dad laughed, meanly, ‘Took you long enough to ask. Where you been?’ ‘I go where the wind goes,’ Darwin said. He laughed too, but like he meant it. He leaned on the stair-post at the bottom of the steps and unbuckled his side straps. ‘What you been doing?’ ‘Oh, you know, establishing justice on earth.’” On Ascension Day, Darwin throws a picnic at a lake for everyone. At the picnic, much healing happens as in for instance this exchange. “Gifts to the blind or the lame on Ascension Day will be rewarded with wealth,’ Paul said, walking with Darwin at the water’s edge. ‘Eggs laid on this day never go bad, and bring good luck if placed in the roof… Clouds appear in the shape of the Lamb of God, and rain collected on Ascension Day is good for inflamed or diseased eyes.’ ‘Does your head hurt, with all this stuff flapping around inside it?’ Paul half-laughed, feeling sorry for his monkey-mind. ‘You could choose to forget,’ Darwin said. ‘Pain, resentment, religious trivia…’ ‘But eggs on the roof, maybe that’s what I need. Better than bats in the belfry, flap-flapping…’ ‘How are you doing?’ ‘Oh, the best I can. Keeping on with my work, doing my duty, making my visits,’ Paul said. Not a very noble recitation. ‘I don’t know what more I can do.’ Darwin stretched his arms up, flaring up, to the sun flashing in the blue-white sky above them. ‘Why not be totally changed into fire?’ he asked. The he danced his fingers around and laughed his head off.” Somehow this passage tipped me off following relatively soon after the previous one. As I was explaining this to Rachel and Rosemary, Rachel pointed out that it was an allusion to something one of the desert fathers said. It seems that this novel would bear rereading in the light of this knowledge. For example, our first sighting of Darwin might have been as a drunk who shows up for communion. Though no doubt many would find this offensive, they should remember that the first appearance of the Holy Spirit results in the disciples being accused of morning drunkenness. I also found myself wondering about Mrs. Zenko, an elderly neighbour who seems to have a sixth sense about when to pop over with a meal or to check on the kids. Everyone was told not to bring anything but Mrs Zenko brings a cake. When challenged, she says that Darwin told her a day in advance so that she had time to prepare something. My take is that she’s analogous to an angel. The prayer life of the characters is reminiscent of the prayers in the Psalms including lack of confidence that God is listening. There is also an interesting exchange about prayer between Lorraine and Paul. Lorraine starts by saying: “Did praying save her? One night, I thought my prayers were working. But they didn’t work for my mother.’ He poked his stick into the deepest channel, making it deeper. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Why people die, when. I can’t believe in a preordained arrangement, with death at the soul’s most opportune time – or in a crafty, secretive God hunched over the plotting table in a war-room universe.’ He pulled the stick downstream, winding it along, and the water followed the stick. ‘We’re in the world. I think we are subject to the world, while we’re here, and that God waits for us. That’s all I can say.’ ‘Not that prayer has no purpose,’ he added after a minute, looking up at her. ‘How could I say that? I pray constantly!’ ‘Yes,’ she said. I spent a bit of time looking at reviews of this book to see if the reviewers caught the stuff about the Holy Spirit. The main reviews failed to mention it. Not surprisingly since it’s fairly subtle. http://compulsiveoverreader.wordpress.com/2009/12/16/good-to-a-fault-by-marina-endicott/ is the only one I could find that mentioned it. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
11:27 am	Wolf Hall - Hilary Mantel Fascinating read even if not my usual taste. Historical fiction about Thomas Cromwell (something like the great great uncle of the more famous Oliver Cromwell). This Cromwell rose from modest family to be very high in the service of King Henry VIII. Apparently he's a villain in "A Man for All Seasons" for executing Thomas More. In this variant More is a semi-villain for treating his wife and some servants despicably and executing many heretics and even claiming that it's OK to lie to them since they're outside the faith. Meanwhile Cromwell is sympathetic to the new trends within Christianity and treats his entire household well. The portrait of Cromwell is fascinating. If anything however he is too good to be true. Nevertheless we side with him in his metaphorical fencing with the nobility that despise him. We're witnessing the rise of management based on skill rather than birth. There was an excellent quote I wanted to include but unfortunately I've already returned the book. (Comment on this)
Sunday, July 4th, 2010
10:45 am	Generation A - Douglas Coupland So so. Some interesting humour. And an outlandish premise. But, half the book is stories made up by a cast of about 5 main characters which are increasingly referential to their actual situation. No doubt much of what was going on went over my head and I'm too lazy to figure it out. Reminds me a bit of the recent Margaret Drabble I read. Not where I would recommend starting with Coupland. If I knew that the rest would be like this I would stop reading him. But I'll come back for more hoping that they'll be like others of his earlier work. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 19th, 2010
7:49 am	Apple iPhone weaknesses This blog is about to have a change of focus. Or more accurately, it's going to expand it's focus. I'll continue to blog about the books I'm reading. However, I'm also going to start making posts about technology industry trends that I think have significant implications into the future. At a "Why develop for Android" event a few weeks back, most of the material was dross. However, there was one key insight. Apples mobile devices with internet connections (iPod touch, iPhone, iPad) all assume that your personal content (music, contacts) will come from being tethered to a computer. Android phones on the other hand assume that it comes from the cloud. This is a game changer in my opinion. Apple has tried to make their cloud services a subscription based service (called MobileMe these days though it has had other names). Eventually they'll get it. Yesterday, in conversation with a recruiter, he pointed out that the Apple app store was the wrong distribution model for in house apps. Imagine a large enterprise that writes in house apps for distribution to employees only. How would they distribute such an iPhone app. Sure they could use the developer provisioning mechanism (user sends device id to developer who builds for that specific device) but it's rather clumsy (arguably has some security benefits). Apple is huge in the consumer market. Do they care enough about the enterprise market to resolve this? (Comment on this)
Saturday, April 24th, 2010
8:54 am	The Urban Halo - Craig Greenfield Subtitled: a story of hope for orphans of the poor. Powerful book. Stylistically because it is honest about internal struggles and mistakes (burnout, near marriage difficulties, ...). Contentwise because he's quite convincing that orphanages are a bad idea. He cites lots of data, including the studies of John John Bowlby of attachment theory fame. In a nutshell, Craig grew up with adopted siblings who were Cambodian refugees. In the midst of an executive career, he and his wife a Cambodian refugee decided to go serve the poor of Cambodia with "Servant's to Asia's Urban Poor." At the core of their ministry is a commitment to living with the poor that they're serving, thus modeling Jesus's incarnation. He's honest about the fact that this is extremely difficult and that in the end, they have resources that the poor don't including a day a week outside of the slums and extended vacations away as well. He decides to work with orphans (many a result of aids amongst parents) and after initially planning to build an orphanage, comes to realize that they're a bad idea largely because the adults aren't really parents (high turnover - imagine you got a new parent every few years would you feel abandoned; high child to adult ratio; no modelling of home life, both chores and husband wife relations; no family to turn to in adult life). Add to that the fact that many children in orphanages aren't really orphans but simply kids whose parents want their kids to have the stuff and education that orphanages supported by Westerners are able to provide .... If you think about them as year long boarding schools ... So, he decided that instead he would look for ways in which they could stay in their community, mostly with extended family like older sisters, aunts, grandmothers who often just needed extra help to be able to include this relative in their family. So, even though it's awkward to say one doesn't think orphanages are the best solution, I'm converted. At the same time I've been listening to an audio book, "Three cups of Tea" the story of Greg Mortenson's building of schools in poor parts of northern Pakistan who is also successful because he lives with and adopts the customs of the people he wants to help. Add in Mother Teresa and one starts to realize that the people most able to effect significant change are those who identify with the people they want to serve. Hmmm. Craig is now living in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver. (Comment on this)
Saturday, March 27th, 2010
10:33 am	Open Arms - Marina Endicott When I went to the library to get a Marina Endicott book, it was Good to a Fault that I was looking for. But since it had recently won an award I wasn't too surprised that I had to settle for an earlier book. Open Arms is an interesting enough story of coming of age for a girl who's been raised by her grandmother. She has very mixed feelings towards her mom and the first section of this 3 section book is about her initial coming to terms with those feelings. The second piece is about her relationship with her Dad's current wife. The final piece is about her relationship with her grandmother. Very much about female relationships so I kind of felt out of place reading it. The first piece is one of those stories where you the reader see things about the first person narrator that they themselves don't seem to notice. There is some nice use of events as metaphors for what's happening in people's lives. This felt like a good piece of craftsmanship rather than something stellar. I guess I'll look forward to reading "Good to a Fault" once interest in it dies down. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, March 9th, 2010
6:58 am	Flash Forward - Robert J. Sawyer Pleasant read, less interesting idea than some of his others. Only a minor amount of what feels to me like advertising Toronto. I did like his handling of the wide variety of ways people react to having a glimpse of their future. But I always have a problem with the suspension of disbelief with any form of time travel, even if it only involves seeing the future. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010
9:19 am	A Pale View of the Hills - Kazuo Ishiguro Not as good as some of his later stuff but still an interesting read. You see things through the eyes of a Japanese woman whose daughter has committed suicide many years after they had relocated to England. Mostly reminiscences of life in Nagasaki after the bomb. There is a big perspective shift at the very end which is quite surprising and contrary to my usual policy I won't give it away since to do so would ruin the experience of reading it. As with most of Ishiguro's work, it's all about the mood. (Comment on this)
Sunday, February 21st, 2010
10:00 am	The Last Word: Beyond the Bible Wars to a New Understanding of Authority of Scripture - N. T. Wright Usual incisiveness. But nothing radically new such as can be found in his work on Jesus and Paul. Remember that the authority of scripture is really shorthand for the authority of God speaking through Scripture. Remember also that to be true to the Reformers we should be searching the scriptures and correcting them where they went wrong. If we appeal to them as a tradition over against people arguing for revised understanding based on reading the scriptures we are doing what the Catholic church did to them. (Comment on this)
9:55 am	Wake - Robert Sawyer Moderately interesting read about a blind girl (styling herself Calculass = Calculus Lass) who regains sight through a device that fixes scrambled signal processing between eye and brain and herself meets and educates a nascent AI. Gives himself a great platform for showing how to educate an AI. As always, I am annoyed by my sense that he's showing off, in this case his withitness about online culture (livejournal and chatting feature prominently) amongst other things. Then there's the fact that there is another story about a chimp cross bonobo who paints representationally. The two stories are brought together in only the slenderest fashion: the fear of humanity about the nascent intelligence of the cross breeding should warn us about how they will react to Calculas' protege. To his credit he has lots of balls in the air, commercialization versus open source, treatment of the blind by the seeing, relationship to a nearly autistic (asperger's syndrome) father, repulsing unwanted advances at school dance, ... The most moving scene is when the blind girl can finally see. For days she's learning much about the world that she already knew but didn't know. "So that's what a water fountain looks like." "How did he decide which parts of the room were significant enough to describe to me and which not (back when I couldn't see)" The author blurb at the end is even more annoying. Did you know that he's one of 7 authors to win a Hugo, Nebula and John Campbell Memorial? His photo on the dusk jacket is even goofier. Also, on the dust jacket Orson Scott Card (who only won 2 of the awards Sawyer won but is 10 times the writer) said "Can Sawyer write? Yes ... with such grace that his writing becomes invisible as the story comes to life in your mind." Well, I've had that experience with Card but not with Sawyer yet. (Comment on this)
Thursday, January 14th, 2010
9:15 pm	The Sea Lady - Margaret Drabble Quite a tour de force this one. Lots of meta narrative and playing with the readers mind. As an example, what the reader initially believes is the voice of the narrator (the public orator) becomes a real person (somewhat gradually revealed). I didn't really like the book though I'm struggling to say why. At some points I quite liked it, at other points I was bored and wished she'd get on with it. There is a rather unique flavour to the book. The best way I can describe it is that you get the feeling that characters are like paints to her and the book is the canvas. She daubs a bit of one into the story then decides that she needs another colour to achieve a certain effect and so looks at her paint tray, mixes a new colour and daubs a bit of that one onto the story canvas. This is a bit fancier than the string puzzle of marionettes that I sometimes gripe about but still very unsatisfying when the reader becomes aware of it. I'll take the middle period Drabble over her later stuff any day. (Comment on this)
Friday, December 18th, 2009
5:18 pm	Johnnie on the Beach Johnnie on the Beach Greenish brown tinged clouds overshadowed by pinkish orange ones with tree and snow speckled mountains peeking through, Throb of tugs pulling two log booms, Roar of helicopter with single light scurrying past small islands, Seagull perched on 2 meter rusty metal pole emerging from the sea, Tied white plastic bag with dark green oval around red letters sweeping back and forth a meter under water, Slosh of waves against barnacle and kelp encrusted rocks, Puzzled dog meandering aimlessly. Typical dog, typical day, typical(?) man, Wondering if there is any way or hope that memories of such typical days, Will comfort him when through decay of age his typical day Consists of 20 hours in bed, Interspersed with sitting at a table eating cafeteria quality food, Please God. (Comment on this)