Category Archives: Books

I am a strange, sordid loop

Books, Video, , , , , ,

I am reading Douglas Hofstadter’s amazing and brain churning I Am a Strange Loop, so I’m noticing loops and recursion everywhere.

This dog machine loop is fascinating, I think it is a way for tennis balls to become soaked in saliva. Maybe it is a way to generate dog orgone? Perhaps it is a dog liberation device, a way for you to have a more equitable relationship with your dog. If you had an automatic feeding machine and this ball thrower, would your relationship with your dog be less of a servant-master relationship?

I like music videos with loops. My friend Rafal just recommended to me that I check out Swedish Band “The Sounds” and of course they have a loopy video. I’m a bigger fan of their “Song with a Mission“, but their video of “Tony the Beat” loops in and around itself.

What I read in February

Books, Lit,

February was evenly split between nonfiction and fiction. I like that, and I think I should keep it that way.

Of these, The Black Swan and How Doctors Think should be read one after another. They are talking about the same thing in different ways and deal with failures in how we (and our doctors and money managers) think. I found them both fascinating.

What I read in January

Books, Pals

It was a busy month, with more adventure than reading.

The only one that I’d really recommend is The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2007 by Dave Eggers. It is sweet, funny, sensitive and overall a wonderful thing. I got it as a present from my neighbors Matt & Megan and it was perfect for my trip to Utah.
These idiots are in Utah.

Books: Supercapitalism

Books, Economics, Incentives, Reviews, Save.the.world

Robert Reich wrote a very surprising book on the interplay of capitalism and democracy. His argument is that we’re seeing a lot of problems in our democracy because we have demanded too much of corporations. If, instead, we strip away some of our fiction that corporations are people, we won’t expect them to be noble, or fair, or honorable.

Instead, we should see corporations for what they are. They are legal contractual agreements between groups of people in order to generate profits. They have no purpose or concern other than the flow of capital and profit. Just as we don’t ask a gun to distinguish between good directions to shoot in or bad directions to shoot in, we shouldn’t ask corporations to do anything but obey our laws and generate as much money as they legally can.

At the same time, we shouldn’t allow corporations any entrance into democratic policy, since they aren’t people. Corporations shouldn’t have the ability to sue to overturn laws or any rights to free speech. Since they are legal agreements without morals, without any concept of right or wrong, corporations have no business participating in democratic politics. They aren’t, after all, people.

People can say things like: “I quite like cheap sneakers, but I don’t want to allow anyone to employ children to make them.” Corporations can’t do that. So people can get together and decide what rules corporations play by.

Now, this is good. It’s a good thing to have a book that connects the dots between corporate influence on politics, the changing marketplace, the economics of globalization and the legal concepts underlying corporations. I just wish it didn’t take so long. The last chapter, “A Citizen’s Guide to Supercapitalism” contains the only real proposals and it is 16 pages. The previous 208 pages are all lead-in. Frankly, I got it early on. The book didn’t need quite that much paper.

To be fair, I did have some good insights while reading.

  • A good portion of the decrease in economic security resulted from container ships and other technological advances which led to a decrease in the security of large corporate profits that supported the deals between labor and management.
  • People want to live on charming Main streets, but the people who work there can’t afford to live there. My neighborhood, Cobble Hill, is fantastically charming, but I couldn’t work there and afford to live there. On the flip side, I can afford to pay rent there, but I couldn’t afford to buy there. I earn around 5 times my first salary, but I can’t afford to purchase in the neighborhood I rent in. Oh, how I’ve worked the numbers but it ain’t happening.
  • Fascinating nugget: Sam is a City employee, and her pension is administered by William Thompson, the city comptroller. He has heavily invested in the Fremont Mining Corporation which owns open pit gold mines in Papua New Guinea. They seem to dump toxic waste in fragile river ecosystems, which is legal since they seem to bribe the local officials to make it legal. This sucks, and Sam would never support it but Bill Thompson (he’s now a potential mayoral candidate) just is in charge of maximizing Sam’s pension.

Books: The Heat Death of the Universe

Books, Lit

So long ago that it seems like a dream – I was in a lecture about short stories.

The Heat Death of the Universe and Other StoriesThe one thing that stuck in my head meat was a description of a short story called “The Heat Death of the Universe.”  In it, the author alternates between describing a young, newlywed mother and the dismal rules of entropy.  All closed systems tend towards disorder, and you see a parallel between this woman’s sealed life and our universe.  Each tends towards disorder and the end of everything.  It sounded amazing and I knew that I’d have to read it some day.

Years passed and it was never really the most important thing to do, but I would think of that story from time to time.   I noodled around on the New York Public Library’s catalog a week or so ago and I requested it.  The first story is an instant classic, just amazing.  The others are not.  One, “Sheep” is a mish mash of repetitive images of sheep, cowboys, an examination of pastoral images, sheep jumping fences, stories collapsing into each other.  I’ll save you the pain of it and give you the most amazing quote from it.

“Where the wolf feeds well, it will feed again.”

Right there, in a nutshell, is why it is important to right by the littlest folks, to stand up when you see small problems or small bullies, and to fix broken windows.

Slave narratives

Books, Reviews, , ,

While Sam and I were in charleston for the wedding, she picked up a book called “My folks don’t want me to talk about slavery” filled with stories by former slaves of what it was like for them and what emancipation was like. Thes stories came about because of one of the things governments can do that are good, public works projects. During the Depression, the government hired a bunch of out of work writers to travel across former slaveowning areas, find former slaves, and record their stories. Project Gutenberg has just published online, for free, an etext about the administrative process that led to this project and how the writers went about it. Sample text in in it also goes in about the religious beliefs and superstitions of the former slaves.

Interestingly, like a lot of old folks, many of these people reminisce fondly about how much better life was during “Slavery time.”