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A well-researched and personally-grounded exploration into the ethics and business of medical studies, and indeed: what a big business it has become. The author himself has diabetes, and decides to undergo an experimental procedure as a test subject, a human guinea pig as it were, where donor insulin-producing cells are transplanted into his liver as part of a potential cure. He decides to learn more about clinical trials and presents the results of his extensive research, while we’re kept in suspense until the end of the book as to whether his own experimental treatment was ultimately successful.

Here are a few things that come to mind when I think about medicine.

1. It’s amazing how far we’ve come, and how much we know.

2. I’m often reminded how basic/primitive, still, our understanding is of many of the body’s systems. Actually I wouldn’t use the word “primitive” with respect to our understanding, rather with respect to our current ability to manipulate and fix, compared to what should eventually be possible. We understand a lot but can’t do much about it.

3. Contrasting the above two ideas is probably a tired cliche. But I’m still continually struck by it. How far we’ve come, and how far we’ve yet to go. Yeah, yeah. Bear with me.

The author doesn’t take sides, and tries to present various concerns in a balanced way — and some of the ethical issues are pretty fascinating. For example, there was a trial of anti-HIV drugs done in Africa where participants in the study either received the drug being tested, or a placebo. Meanwhile, back “home”, there are standard, helpful HIV treatments available, and common practice is to compare a new drug with the current best-known treatment on the market in order to determine whether the new drug is any better than the current baseline. But because poor, HIV infected Africans didn’t ordinarily have access to the baseline drug in the first place, it wasn’t administered as part of the study, either. As a result, half of the study participants (who received the placebo and effectively went untreated) died or became sick. There was, not too surprisingly, an outcry about the ethics here. On the one hand, by doing a placebo-controlled trial, the new drug could potentially have been approved and brought to market much faster. On the other hand, placebo-based trials are almost never done in the U.S. or developed countries when baseline care (my terminology) is available. The drug company which sponsored this study argued that ultimately many more lives would be saved by faster approval of its drug, and futhermore that the people receiving the placebos wouldn’t have likely received any care at all, anyway. Others argued that people participated in the trials out of desperation and under the belief that they would receive actual treatment, and to have denied baseline treatment was unfair exploitation — that although we know that the one and only purpose of medical research is to gather data, not to provide treatment, in many circumstances it’s difficult for subjects, particularly those who don’t have any routine or even accessible medical care at all, to understand or believe this no matter how it’s explained to them (and researchers have an incentive to not explain it tirelessly but rather to allow or encourage the formation of hope).

I’ve encountered a few friends or colleagues recently who have tremendous mistrust for the medical establishment. (That goes together with stories in the news about parents who somehow remain convinced that there’s a link between childhood vaccines and autism, I think.) One person believed that chemotherapy is essentially a scam perpetrated by doctors and hospitals in order to make money, an expensive and ultimately unnecessary treatment because there are other, cheaper, more natural, less harmful treatments available. (That view disgusted me, since I and most of us have friends who’ve dealt with cancer.) Or that in the field of psychiatry, drugs are “pushed” on patients by doctors who are paid by drug companies to write prescriptions. (Incentivized? An area of concern, but not something with which I’d condemn a whole field of medicine.) In reality, the world of medicine is extremely complex, and simplistic conspiracy theories like that just don’t ring true. The key is, everything in medicine depends on data. If there’s some compelling evidence that, for example, eating precisely ten navel oranges a day cures cancer better than chemo, somebody will probably fund a clinical trial to test that. In general drug companies do fund the majority of studies, but there are layers of independent review boards, politicians, research hospitals, and lawyers ready to swoop in, all of which creates an atmosphere of oversight and regulation. Private donors, too (as in the case of the diabetes-cure trial the author underwent). It’s not perfect, and there are murky ethical boundaries sometimes crossed, policies which need to be tweaked, incentives and regulations to be adjusted and so on, but as a whole, the machine works.

Overall, Chasing Medical Miracles conveys a message of hope. More clinical trials than ever before are being done, more stuff is being tested, and although “miracles” are unlikely, we’re chipping away at the rock face, gathering data a little at a time, and I think it’s okay to put some trust in the system.

[<img[/img/book/Zodiac.png]]
Title: Zodiac
Author: Neil Stephenson
Reviews: [http://www.amazon.com/dp/0802143156 Amazon]

Neil Stephenson has matured as a writer, and it didn’t take much effort to realize that this book predates //Snow Crash//, but is obviously better than //The Big U//, at least according to the impression I get of his first book. Still, as a Stephenson aficionado I feel obligated to read all his works, starting from the earliest, so //The Big U// it is. (It’s a good thing I’m not an Isaac Asimov aficionado.)

Next book I read, I’m going to keep a stack of Post-It-Notes handy so that I can tag and later list out all the typos I find. Because //Zodiac// sure was full of them. The writing style decayed a bit towards the last several chapters. I have no complaints about the story, though, as implausible as it may seem, which would have (and still would) make a great movie.

[<img[The Reluctant Fundamentalist|/img/book/ReluctantFundamentalist.png]] Title: The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Author: Moshin Hamid
[http://www.amazon.com/dp/0151013047 Amazon]

First of all, let me get the obvious out of the way. The main character and narrator of the story is not really a fundamentalist. He’s just a guy, and doesn’t claim any strong religious or moral beliefs (as we might automatically associate with that particular f-word). He seems to be using //fundamentalism// (which I believe is mentioned nowhere but the title, and so that could have just been something slapped on by the publisher as an attention catching sales device, in which case the title is as much misleading as perhaps an outright lie, although there are plenty of meanings that can be ascribed to the word, which just means, literally, “pertaining to basics”) to mean “a longing for home, and for one’s family, despite the lack of prosperity and limited opportunities therewith”. When I think of the colloquial meaning of “fundamentalism” I think of closed-mindedness, simple-mindedness, a fear of newness or of anything which challenges existing belief, a clinging rigidity to existing belief in an often irrational way. So he’s not what I’d call a reluctant //fundamentalist// because fundamentalism has absolutely nothing to do with anything in the book; he’s just a successful hard-working man who’s homesick and feels guilt at his success because his family is in danger, and he’s reluctant to give up his world of prosperity, although to him it comes with a price, to go be with his family.

The vehicle for the story is somewhat novel, which is refreshing, but this also allows it to be thoroughly condescending: The narrator (the so-called “fundamentalist”) is telling his story to an American tourist visiting Lahore, a city in Pakistan. The two are initially strangers, and we, as the tourist, do not have a speaking role anywhere in this tale. The narrator, a pleasant young Pakistani man named Changez who attended Harvard Business School and through hard work and determination aced just about all there was to be aced, intersperses his tale with a couple paragraphs at the end of each chapter in which he comes back to the present in a Lahorean cafe and offers us tea, an ordered meal, or a local delicacy. But presumably we (the tourist) are very uncomfortable in this foreign land. Changez continually needs to reassure us in an extremely polite way that no, the waiter means no harm, that no, the bulge in his jacket isn’t a gun, that it’s perfectly safe to walk after dark //but still//, I’ll give you a ride back to your hotel because you’ll feel better, and on and on. This is perhaps a caricature of some kind of xenophobic world-unwise nervous American, brought to his knees by the reverberating sound of words like “terrorism!” and “Islamic fundamentalism!”, and here he is, in a Muslim country, and so he must be… scared! So let’s explicitly reassure him, by calling out and interpreting his every blink, and saying “ah, I see you’re blinking, you must be a little nervous, I totally understand, I would be too were I in your shoes, but I assure you, there’s nothing to be nervous about”. Over and over. Somehow, this doesn’t speak to me. Perhaps the author is implying that //we//, as Americans fumbling about in what we incorrectly perceive to be a world fraught with //fundamentalism// (as in the colloquial sense), are in fact the “reluctant fundamentalist(s)” of the title. But why “reluctant”, then? I can bang this round peg into this square hole some more, but Ockham’s Razor says that the book’s title is a marketing gimmick.

I’ll sum it up as: A coming of age story in which a young man finds out what really matters in his life, against a distant backdrop of political events following the 9-11 terrorist attacks, and a not-so-distant backdrop of his tangled love affair with a depressed young woman. Reluctance, I’ll give him that, but not fundamentalism. And the story’s condescending, somewhat moralizing tone didn’t add anything, but didn’t detract from the enjoyable aspects of the tale.

I was expecting a little more from this book, but it was a fast read and hard to put down, so I won’t complain.

[<img[/img/book/AGreyMoonOverChina.jpg]] I’m left wanting to go walk along the beach, to reflect on humanity and life, to ruminate. This story is set in space, on other planets, in wormholes; it deals with A.I. and robots, but its not science fiction; neither is it a fantastic-voyage kind of space opera, like Star Trek or Star Wars (even though the latter did try to tackle ethical issues, at least in many of the episodes of TNG that I saw, back in the day) or many of the science fiction books I’ve read. Rather the backdrop, the setting, the science itself aren’t important except as a vehicle for a sweeping story following one man’s life and what he sees through the small window of his own perception of the worlds and people whose lives he created. He’s neither a hero nor an anti-hero, and unmistakably clear throughout the story is the lack of black-and-white absolutes, the often brutal and tragic clash of ambitions. It is, as one reviewer on the back cover puts it, “a sadly hopeful novel”, one woven through every human emotion.

Reality isn’t straightforward or a neat little package, and rarely do clever plots neatly play out and resolve themselves in actuality, so I appreciate novels like this. In terms of the writing, at the paragraph level, the style is good, although I ran into a few typos and editing errors, but nothing which detracted from the story. On a slightly larger scale, perhaps taking a step back, the plot is a little rough around the edges. Often the author will set the stage, let events unfold, and then much later on, still in the same setting, describe how a certain character is present and it turns out was present all along and is now doing something, which is odd and takes a little bit of getting used to because that character’s presence should seemingly have been mentioned before. Where this happened, I needed to go back and, in a manner of speaking, edit the memory of my imagination of the current scene, inserting the just-now mentioned character or object or fact. Revising history, at least in short-term memory. But perhaps that’s a feature of the story, given that it’s told as if a memoir by an old man, the architect of the story’s events, and as imperfect a writer as he is a human being. As we would expect.

Not bad for a book I randomly picked up in the library. I’m glad I read this, and look forward to the author’s next work.

Here’s a list of a few of books I’ve read lately, since I don’t seem to have time at the moment to write much more about each:

”’//A Fire Upon the Deep// by Vernor Vinge:”’ Sequel to ”[[A Deepness in the Sky]]”, but written earlier (1992). Somehow the story isn’t quite as satisfying as the prequel, but many concepts are mind-blowing as usual. The Tines, Zones of Thought, the concept of Powers… I’m left with more questions than answers, but they’re thought-provoking questions. I’d call this more of a broad-spectrum sci-fi yarn than a true hard-s.f. novel, but it has aspects of both.

”’//A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius// by Dave Eggers:”’ Ah… I understand the point and why it got glowing reviews (at least according to the back cover, which doesn’t cover any detractors of course), but this book is a bit like //Tuesdays with Morrie//, not in subject matter of course, but by way of being a book which somehow appeals to popular audiences and suddenly becomes a “#1 New York Times Bestseller” without really being such an incredible or deserving literary work. Something which is popular because it’s popular. So all right, this wasn’t bad, but it doesn’t “speak to me” as they say, and it in no way shape or form deserves to be compared with //The Catcher in the Rye//. What ignorant fellow originally said that? Just because both books deal with teen angst, in completely different ways, from totally different perspectives? Well all right, fine. It’s an accurate slice of said angst, of immaturity struggling to be mature and to find and create //meaning// in meaningless aspects of the world, and so on. I found myself identifying with those camera guys who came to tape the interview between the author’s ‘zine’s staff and the MTV Real World cartoonist guy, nodding wisely and rolling their eyes while the kids tried to seem all important and pretend that their “business meeting” was anything other than a meaningless act, everyone trying to look good on camera. But then again, I was like that, to some degree, way back when. Or was I? I never watched MTV or tried to publish a magazine or represent myself as being a maker of culture or even much of a participant in the popular culture of the day. But in other respects? Maybe. Here’s a mini review I wrote as a series of text messages from the Las Vegas airport after finishing the book: “I understand the point and why it got good reviews, but it was too “angsty” and dragged in a lot of places… Like, was he really thinking that? OK sure, but there must have been more to what he was thinking, and it gets repetitive. For the last fifty pages I started skimming through most of the material. The author tries to be poetic, stream-of-consciousness-emitting. But a great deal of what he writes is about how he thinks a great deal about thinking, and what he should be thinking. And then he goes on to write about thinking about thinking about thinking about what he should be thinking, and why, and so on. Meta-thinking, to the nth degree.” Worrying about why he’s worrying. Ah, I just don’t identify. Are these thoughts and worries (perhaps ones everyone has, many of which rightly weigh heavily on the author’s mind, but many of which are just fleeting thoughts) truly solid material for repetitive exposition that goes on and on and on? There were some funny parts; the first half was good; it sort of went downhill from there. (I think this paragraph channels a little bit of the style of the book.) The story isn’t written in the style of a personal journal or memoir, isn’t written as a novel telling a story, isn’t even all that clever, so I’m not sure whom I (as a member of the audience) is supposed to be. A victim of overly intense and repetitive introspection?

”’//Axiomatic// by Greg Egan:”’ Collection of short stories by the master of hard-s.f., although his position is being slowly usurped by Vernor Vinge. And I don’t find any of Egan’s books on bookstore shelves anymore, which is unfortunate. This set of tales really tries to bend the mind, and succeeds frequently.

Hmm, I guess I did write a decent amount about each. I should break these up into separate posts.

Time now for //Harry Potter and the Concluding Volume//. Somehow I’m not as excited about these books as others are. I think the movies had something to do with this lack of excitement. As well as the big deal it’s all supposed to be, and perhaps that this is an internal mechanism for avoiding personal after-hype let-down (but no, I wasn’t exactly counting down the days), or simply because it’s all so //popular// now, so mainstream, like [[iProducts]]. And the fact that J.K. Rowling is now a celebrity, and how her comments in response to the book having been leaked to the Internet prior to the official release date somehow lead me to read a bit of her personality (as I imagine it) into her writing — all because a few frustrated/upset/hostile comments regarding the book leak? I would have been a little more humble, a little more gracious, a little more… accepting… but definitely humble, in her place, I hope. I do subscribe a bit to the “plagiarism is the highest form of flattery” school of thought.

My comments on the fifth Potter movie (“Fifth”), clipped from an email:
: About a third of the way through the movie I was thinking… wow, this one’s really “meaty”; it’s redeemed the movie series after the horrible Fourth. But after it was over though, I thought: yeah, it was good, but it still doesn’t by any means dethrone Third as being by far the best in the series. (Fifth is second place in my book, now…) Third had this characteristic effect where the camera zoomed through windows and clockwork pendulums; I remember exactly one scene from Fifth that had the same camera zoom effect through window glass, and that made me think, wait a second, do we have the same director here? I don’t think so, though. Anyway, my problem with Fourth especially (and to a lesser extent with Fifth) is that they try so hard to just //tell the story// literally as per the book that somehow the “magic” one imagines of the magical world is far less, on the screen, than in the mind’s eye while reading.

[<img[/img/book/MonkeyGirl.png]] Best nonfiction I’ve read in a while.

A long time ago, back in college, I read through just about the entire [http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/faqs-qa.html TalkOrigins] website. The debate was fascinating to “watch”. How could (and still can) one side could be so completely blind to what the other side was (is) saying?

It’s a kind of debate I’ve seen played out a lot. One side makes an argument, the other side addresses that argument and makes a counterargument, and the first side then completely ignores the counterargument and continues to argue along the same lines as it did before. Rinse and repeat.

Back at UCLA the same thing happened in articles and letters to the editor in support of or against certain issues. One such was affirmative action, which went like this: (1) The pro-AA side states its case (e.g., righting past wrongs, making up for current disadvantage, etc.). (2) The anti-AA side recognizes the problem and the arguments, then lists a bunch of very persuasive reasons why those arguments are misguided (AA does not right past wrongs or make up for current disadvantage because… AA is itself reverse discrimination, two wrongs don’t make a right, AA sets unequal standards, breeds resentment, devalues student achievements and sets up students to question their own achievements, and so on). The anti-AA side goes even further to propose alternatives (outreach, using economic factors and never race, targeting resources at primary schools, etc.). (3) The pro-AA side repeats, more stridently, the same arguments it made before, never addresses or attempting to invalidate a point made by the anti-AA side. Now both sides are accused of “talking past each other”, but… which side is ignoring the other side’s arguments? And consequently, which side has the stronger arguments? Indeed one side (the pro-AA’ers’) main tactic always seemed to me an appeal to emotion rather than logic. Anyone remember [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Connerly Ward Connerly]? I admired his courage in holding steadfast to his beliefs despite frequent and vociferous vilification by his peers.

Monkey Girl tells the story of how this kind of argument (evolution vs. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_design Intelligent Design] is taken to court, where the two sides are forced to engage each other’s arguments. The result is predictable, but the “fight” is both fun to watch and revealing of people’s motives and drives.

[<img[/img/book/DiamondAge.png]] Not quite as vivid and good as ”[[Cryptonomicon]]”, but full of interesting ideas. The Diamond Age is a picture of the future in saturated reds, greens and blues. It glosses over details; it makes what I feel are incorrect assumptions about the future, but it //will// stimulate. The story laid out is like a dream story, partly because a great deal of the book is a book within a book: the //Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer// also mentioned on the cover, or in the full title: //The Diamond Age, or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer//. The book within a book is an interactive story, meant to tug just the right brain-strings to build up intelligence and independence of thought, or what the book calls //subversiveness//. The ability to think outside of social rules and challenge the system, shake it up a little, and in doing so repel, in some manner, the stagnation of society which inevitably takes place when there are //too many// rules, when the rules are //too good//, and everyone seems happy and no further //progress// is made.

Stephenson’s process of creating his future world reminds me a bit of how I used to think when I was very little. I played with my building toys, and one time I figured out in my head how a perpetual motion machine could be made (but then I forgot how it had been done, and could never recall how exactly the device was hooked up). I thought of a system for transporting objects to any place in the house, using a network of ceiling fans, where the blades of each fan overlapped the blades of the fans next to it so an object could be shifted from one fan to another as necessary and easily be transported anywhere. I never thought much about the exact mechanics of all this (such as how the objects would be shifted), but it was an image I thought about a few times. Stephenson’s way of thinking reminds me of how I used to think, back then, and what I could have done if I had had thousands of little electric motors instead of just one, and hundreds of thousands of little rubber belts and pulleys, and much more complicated and capable little plastic interlocking pieces all spread out in a vast array. But sadly I didn’t have all this, and so I outgrew that way of thinking.

The book’s vehicle is a society in which nanotechnology is fully realized and just about any object can be manufactured freely in the home, in devices I pictured as looking like glorified microwave ovens called “matter compilers”. A matter compiler requires a “feed”, however, which is like a gas line, except that it carries little cubes and tetrahedrons (well, that’s how I imagined them at least) of “raw matter” to feed the microwave oven. Here’s where you have to stop thinking about the logic behind the story too much and just accept things as they are, because otherwise you might be tempted to start asking a whole bunch of questions: (1) Why couldn’t companies just nano-manufacture goods centrally and distribute them through normal retail channels? Why is there such a benefit to having microwave-style matter compilers in the home? (2) Couldn’t a home matter compiler use blocks of fuel which are bought centrally, and added into the machine as needed? I have a color inkjet printer, but it would be silly to have special “ink lines” carrying fresh ink to my printer from a central ink factory so that it’ll never run dry. Obviously there’s a balance where if my “printer” actually created all of the food that I eat, perhaps “ink” would be worth piping into houses, but in the book not too many people actually ate compiled food regularly, if they could afford it, because it wasn’t as good as the real thing. (3) If nanotechnology reaches its full potential, that is, we can create anything by manipulating individual atoms, then it’s hard to believe that as the book implies, there is no such thing as even halfway decent A.I. or speech generation such that a network of humans needs to be on call at all times and ready to act out parts from interactive (“ractive”, as the book terms) games. A main theme of //The Diamond Age// is that the protagonistic young lady’s instance of the //Illustrated Primer// is read to her by a certain ractor who is on call (seemingly at all times, ready on an instant’s notice to start giving audio to words from the Illustrated Primer’s dynamically generated story), and that somehow the “words between the words” //not// in the word choice of the primer itself, but rather in the tone of voice of the human narrator, have a strong effect on the outcome of the character of the girl who is under the influence of this particular //Primer//. If a nano-computer is smart enough to dynamically tailor a story to a particular (protagonistic, named Nell) young lady’s intelligence, emotions, and environment from moment to moment, and to create such humanlike prose, in fact to create dynamic and animated illustrations on the fly representing this story, then it’s surprising that such a computer couldn’t provide just as plausible a voice, as well. It’s surprising that a human voice can cleanly introduce nuance into a heavily-nuanced text which //isn’t// the nuance intended by the creator of the text itself, or that if the text itself isn’t heavily nuanced that it can be compelling in the first place, even when read with the right nuances created and introduced using tone of voice by a human reader.

Stephenson has a love affair with Turing machines and in my favorite segment of the book-within-a-book uses them in a metaphoric way to teach Nell how computers work and eventually to show her what their limitations are, and what the limitations of the //Primer// itself are. But I think he misunderstands the //scale// and //complexity// of such things, (not that I have a perfect grasp of any of this), because metaphorically, for the purposes of illustration within the world of the //Primer// it all makes sense, but then take it to the scale of real computer programs like the one actually running the //Primer// (which can write solid prose and even seem to understand on a very deep level the mind and the world of a child), and although a program like that can be translated to a Turing machine (which in computer science is only used as a theoretical tool for analyzing algorithms and how long certain problems would take to solve, anyway), one has to wonder whether the human brain itself is a Turing machine and if not, why not. //Diamond Age// (through the //Primer//) strongly says “not” but doesn’t even imply there’s a question of why not, although perhaps it tries to convey that “too much complexity” is the answer, so that we really are Turing machines, just ones that can’t be reasonably emulated because we’re so complex. That’s why I say “misunderstanding of complexity” because if you can manipulate atoms individually and build //anything//, why not build a computer far more powerful than the brain? After all, our brain cells are huge and inefficient. //One cell// would be made of a number of atoms measured in the //hundreds of trillions// (I think that’s a conservative estimate, too), and that’s not even a number you can conceive of. Anyway, I’m rambling (and reaching the end of this annoying tether on my attention span) so let me say that I enjoyed //The Diamond Age//, that the book painted colorful, saturated images, but that I think Stephenson is still in the process of (at the point that he wrote this book) maturing as a writer. I’d be curious to see what he comes up with if he comes out of the past (//Cryptonomocon//) and goes back to the future (no pun intended). I’m beginning to realize that it’s //so much harder// to write (well) about the future, and that even when you do, no one takes you seriously. (Although I fault them, for lacking imagination.)

Aha, here’s an interesting note, via [http://theculturalgutter.com/sciencefiction/crashing_the_party.html#comments a comment] on [http://theculturalgutter.com/sciencefiction/crashing_the_party.html this page], which quotes from an interview with Neal Stephenson himself:

: //Is cyberpunk over?//
:
: The best I can muster is that for a while, information technology was incredibly important, yet it had been ignored or gotten wrong by science fiction. There was this vast terrain of virgin territory, and there was a land rush. Now the revolutionary nature of that technology has become familiar. To make the obligatory social criticism kind of comment here, the bursting of the Internet bubble has proven that information technology is just another technology.

…and so it’s going to be for every technology, and it’s true that we have to evaluate a novel in terms of the technological zeitgeist in which it was written, but still, it’s fun to look at things directly in the present instead of through the lens of the past. I don’t think cyberpunk is over, just that “modern cyberpunk” is different, and that it’s very very hard to write. And on the other hand you have books like //Neuromancer// (which reminded me of the computer game //System Shock//, by the way) which are much more poetic and don’t delve all that much into specific detail, and so are more able to stand the test of time. Both types of work have their place.

[<img[/img/book/DeepnessInTheSky2.jpg]] The depth and imagination behind this s.f. novel are awe inspiring. I was unacquainted with Vernor Vinge’s work, except that I’d heard of //A Deepness in the Sky// as being some sort of award-winning novel and had had it on my reading list for a long time. Finally read it, years and years later.

I wonder where Vinge’s inspiration for “Focus” comes from. Ritalin/Adderall/etc. taken to extremes? Do “zipheads” (pejorative used by normal characters in the book for “Focused persons”) need to sleep? Vinge being a college professor (at UC San Diego), did he observe students popping ADD pills or experience the effects of said pills and decide to explore that theme (the observed characteristics while on medication) taken to the extreme? In the book, privileged members of a certain planetary culture essentially enslave part of their population by having their subordinates’ brain chemistry rewired such that they have the opposite of ADD, what perhaps we could call ASD (Attention Surplus Disorder?), but taken to the logical extreme: the absolute necessity of having a singular task, however complex, to fixate (hyperfocus) on, to the banishment of all unrelated thought. The book’s zipheads won’t even attend to their own personal hygiene, because that would be an unnecessary distraction from working in the domains of their respective fixations. Consequently they need “handlers”, but the result is that they effortlessly achieve feats — scientific, linguistic, artistic, and on — which are far out of reach for normal folks like us. The catch is that they can’t appreciate the “big picture” of their accomplishments, that is, that while what they are focusing on is fully and deeply satisfying to them, they can’t see the //significance// of that satisfaction. (I’m reminded now, somehow, of the talking cow in one of the //Hitchhiker’s Guide// books (I believe it was //The Restaurant at the End of the Universe//) which (or “who”?) //wanted// to be eaten, and the moral dilemma that then ensued among the diners to whom the cow was happily offering its parts.) Per the book (//Deepness//), Focused persons by-choice lose many of the aspects which made them //human// and become, essentially, very smart computers. Entirely capable of feeling emotion, but //unwilling// (by choice) to even so much as have a conversation with anyone if it doesn’t relate to the subject of fixation, as such a conversation would be irrelevant.

The story’s backdrop is a complex space opera, but the ideas introduced effortlessly through the plot stick long after the story is over.

[<img[/img/book/Accelerando.png]] Before I mention anything about the rest of the book, I should note that I have a hard time with Charles Stross’s writing style in reference to certain intangible aspects of writing such as cadence and fluidity. Although I don’t read nearly as much as I’d like to, I find that when I start reading a book, I’ll soon lock onto the writer’s //way// of writing. There’s a personality and voice that comes through in the aggregate of all the little, inconsequential choices made when turning an idea or a sequence of events into prose: Should two ideas be joined with an “and” into one sentence, or broken up into two sentences? (Why did I just say “broken up” and not “broken”? Both would have worked, but one just sounded better to me. It was the rhythm.) I was going to list more examples of what I’m sure amount to //hundreds// of choices that present themselves when writing even a single paragraph (and most of which are resolved subconsciously in the writer’s mind), but my point is that there’s a lot that can be read into the spaces between the words. And if anything’s going to be read into anything, I’m going to do it.

I’m not sure if this book paints a plausible version of the future, but the path it takes //is// followed mostly to its conclusion. The premise is that moving hundreds of years into the future, the majority of conscious life implements itself in far more efficient media than our very slow neuron-based brains. Life then flourishes in such an environment and begins to disassemble the planets to use as raw matter, to reassemble into a substance something called “computronium” which is supposedly the most efficient configuration of matter for performing computation (and so for implementing structures that themselves implement brains, consciousness, //life//). The author doesn’t elaborate on this, though, and I wonder: aren’t there many kinds of computation for which different structures are best suited? There are many, many components to even the simplest computer nowadays, and one of our computers would be downright primitive (hopefully in terms of structure as well as simple miniaturization and speeding up components) in ten years, let alone 100 years. There’s memory, a whole slew of different arithmetic and logic units, registers/caches (which are different kind of memory), buses for data transfer, specialized processing for integer math, floating point math, 3-D graphics, and so on. Maybe the idea behind computronium is that we’re only referring to a substance for the efficient implementation of neural networks, but that still seems rather limiting. There are some things neural nets are very good at, and other things we just want to implement as specific circuitry. So it seems to me a little more structure is involved. Even our brains, which use only neurons, use many different kinds of neurons organized in different ways to organize different structures. For example, brain structures for processing visual information, auditory information, language, and so on. I don’t even want to claim that, given our brains nowadays being only neuron-based, there’s a reason we’d want to do complicated numerical mathematics using neural nets, even though incredibly some rare people //can// take cube-roots of 20-digit numbers in 10 seconds or so. I’d say that takes a tremendous amount of practice and abnormal type of focus. Still, a dedicated circuit could do that sort of thing in a millionth of a second, with no practice or learning or trial-and-error to get the method down, and so relying on neural nets is wasteful. Don’t take the planets apart for //that//, please.

Consider that you’re a conscious, intelligent entity implemented in some computer. You have a neural network a thousand times bigger than a standard human brain. It’s implemented electronically, so it runs ten thousand times as fast as a human brain. What does that mean? How can we on the outside conceive of what your brain is like on the inside, of what it’s like to be you? Even if you had only the same number of neurons as we did, they could operate much faster. Instead of chemical signals being released from vesicles into gaps, you’d be all electronic. Let’s say that would make you 10,000 times faster. So you’d be able to, say, read a book in 1/10,000 the time I could (assuming you’re not even optimized for reading or taking in data some way other than visually using your brain’s “OCR” ability, which you probably would be). Four hours of my reading time would take you 1.4 seconds. Those 1.4 seconds would probably still seem to you like 4 hours, just that the speed of your thinking would mean the world around you would be at a virtual standstill. You could take your time and do years-long analyses of simple problems, then act before a couple hours had passed. Your brain’s mood-affecting chemicals could easily be altered (as would have to be the case) so that you could focus your attention seemingly for days at a time (two full 24-hour periods, subjectively, would just take up 17 seconds of our time), with no distractions (like all the maintenance-work we have to do here to keep our bodies fed, bathed, exercised, and otherwise taken care of) and there’s no reason you’d need sleep or even get tired. You could get a whole lot done (whatever kind of work is meaningful to you), and that’s with just the same number of brain cells as we have, and limited memory and mental computation abilities. No reason to stick with that number, to not have some reliable mental RAM, and a calculator with which you’d just //think// numbers at and immediately //know// the answer.

That’s just a singularly narrow attempt at trying to understand what it would be like to expand in a small way beyond the limits that our cell-based brain hardware imposes. I’m making all sorts of assumptions about those limits, too. (But that’s a discussion for another time: For example, why can some people seem to read extremely fast, supposedly without skimming? I can skim material quickly, but don’t gain much out of it save for a general idea of what the writer was communicating; I prefer to read every word. If skimming is adequate for extracting information from a piece of writing, then we should create a form of writing which allows an author to write material in a form of shorthand which, when read at “read-every-word” speed, conveys just as much information as skimmers reading ordinary English (and therefore skipping most of the words on the page) would absorb.)

Back to the book. There’s a wealth of ideas here, but the imagination and realization (conveyed by the author’s descriptions of the technologies, devices, environments, etc.) seem halfway there. Rough sketches; inadequately described. Like an image the author himself doesn’t see clearly or completely in his mind’s eye, but wants to invoke anyway. So I’m left without a vivid scene in my own mind’s eye with which to appreciate the story, and that’s probably what it is about the style, the information between the words, that bothered me. It’s possibly less so the words themselves which are at issue than the un-clarity of what’s being described: the lack of a unified vision. Since many s.f.-ers seem to regard Stross’s books highly, perhaps it’s just that he doesn’t speak my exact language, doesn’t match my protocol for painting images with words. Again that’s not to knock the interesting ideas discussed, but just that this all seemed like an agglomeration of things I’d read before, and the plot wasn’t compelling enough to make up for that.

//Strange Brains and Genius: The Secret Lives of Eccentric Scientists and Madmen//, by Clifford A. Pickover. Yes, another Pickover book I haven’t picked over but instead read cover to cover. After reading all about hypergraphia (a word not in Firefox’s spell checker), I’ve decided to manifest some excessive writing of my own. See [[Browser Compatibilities]] below. Rest assured that I won’t be practicing self-trepanation (drilling a hole in my skull), self-defenestration (all right, that wasn’t something from the book, but it’s funny to imagine the literal meaning, unlike that of the prior term), I’m not excessively shy, I don’t have OCD (Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder) or TLE (Temporal Lobe Epilepsy, which the author speculates convincingly is responsible for many alien-abduction and supernatural religious experiences), or even good old manic depression. Depressingly, or perhaps not, I’m absolutely normal (besides the hypergraphia, which isn’t a compulsion in my case, I don’t think, but rather just because I can type fast). //Strange Brains// provides a lot of food for thought, and expect some more of those thoughts here (and more hypergraphia) in the near future.

A note on [[Browser Compatibilities]]: a summary of the whole thing is that I bragged I could program Gmail in about a week. That’s about it.

A book by Ray Kurzweil about the inevitability of computers becoming more powerful than the human brain and gaining consciousness, what consciousness means and where it comes from (and how computers can have it), and what the future holds for us.

I’ve just started reading, but this is turning out to be a fascinating book, more complete in its treatment of the topic than I thought it would be. This is a topic I’ve found fascinating ever since reading [[Diaspora]] and [[Permutation City]].

Done reading (actually, that was a while ago, before starting [[Are We Spiritual Machines?]].

This book is a collection of essays based on a forum which was itself a discussion of the ideas presented in Ray Kurzweil’s book [[The Age of Spiritual Machines]], in which several scientists/academics present their arguments against the theses in Kurzweil’s book. Following the critics’ essays are Kurzweil’s responses to each in turn, in which he adeptly counters the arguments they bring up and tears some of them to complete shreds. One (which he tears to shreds) is made by [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Searle John Searle], whose famous “Chinese Room” argument, which we discussed in an [[A.I.]] class at [[UCLA]] years ago, didn’t leave me quite satisfied back then, either.

: John Searle is very well known for his development of a thought experiment, called the “Chinese Room” argument. He set out to prove that human thought was not simply computation. His main premise is that a computational process in itself cannot have an “understanding” of events and processes.

In more detail, from the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Room Chinese Room] Wikipedia article:

: Suppose that, many years from now, we have constructed a computer that behaves as if it understands Chinese. In other words, the computer takes Chinese characters as input and, following a set of rules (as all computers can be described as doing), correlates them with other Chinese characters, which it presents as output. Suppose that this computer performs this task so convincingly that it easily passes the Turing test. In other words, it convinces a human Chinese speaker that the program is itself a human Chinese speaker. All the questions the human asks are responded to appropriately, such that the Chinese speaker is convinced that he or she is talking to another Chinese-speaking human. The conclusion proponents of strong AI would like to draw is that the computer understands Chinese, just as the person does.
:  
: Now, Searle asks us to suppose that he is sitting inside the computer. In other words, he is in a small room in which he receives Chinese characters, consults a rule book, and returns the Chinese characters that the rules dictate. Searle notes that he doesn’t, of course, understand a word of Chinese. Furthermore, he argues that his lack of understanding goes to show that computers don’t understand Chinese either, because they are in the same situation as he is. They are mindless manipulators of symbols, just as he is — and they don’t understand what they’re ’saying’, just as he doesn’t.

Kurzweil’s retort, in an article whose title begins “Locked In His Chinese Room…”, is essentially that in order to pass the Turing Test, the “rule book” referred to has to be so extraordinarily complex that it, the rule book, is what necessarily needs to understand Chinese in the fullest sense of the word, just as well as a Chinese-speaking person does. The part Searle plays sitting inside the computer where he consults the rule book is just that of one of the senses. He’s an eye, let’s say. Does the eye have an understanding of Chinese? Of course not. But the rule book is entirely equivalent in its range of responses to a Chinese human (such that it can pass the Turing Test), and would need to be at least as intelligent as a human. It follows that the rule book, being that complex, certainly does have what we would term “understanding”.

Another class of questions (phrased as counter-arguments) Kurzweil answers is: could we simulate human intelligence in a computer to the degree that such a computer could pass a Turing Test but //not// be conscious? Such a simulation would itself be intelligent (by virtue of its responses), but since the simulation isn’t really thinking, just computing the answer to the question “how //would// a human respond?”, could we really say that it has understanding? How could it have consciousness? Even if we’re simulating a human brain itself, if the simulation runs via a different method (for example, not by simulating neurons in a massively parallel neural net with the structure of a human mind, but via a single-instruction-at-a-time computer program which evaluates the functional result of the same neural net), how could that have consciousness?

In answer to this one, he points out that it doesn’t make sense to implement a simulation this way. We’re better off simulating the actual neural-net structure of the brain, and observing the outputs. In fact, the variation of human response is so complex that a simulation of what the brain //would do// would have to be orders of magnitude more complex than the brain itself, and to give adequate results would have to essentially contain a model of the brain, in some form. And that brain, in its “some form”, we would come to accept as conscious.

Very interesting read. Read [[The Age of Spiritual Machines]], then work through this one.

//The Know It All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World//. Book by A.J. Jacobs.

The author reads 100% of the entire Encyclopaedia Brittanica from A to Z and sums up his experience in this amusing little paperback. Not oddly, although he gains a small amount of raw academic information, most of the knowledge he does gain from this little endeavor is not from the Good Books themselves but rather from the reactions of others as he repeatedly seeks validation, encouragement, or even just acknowledgment. That’s understandable, given an entire year of every free moment spent with one’s nose in the books. So although this makes the knowledge gained not exist as much for it’s own sake (rather, it’s being gained just so the author can feel validated), still, a lot of what he does just seems, well, stupid. For example, he read an extensive article on chess, complete with some pointers and tips on good chess strategy, and decides to test out his newly-acquired chess skills by playing against an experienced player. Actually, just a kid in a chess club. Result? Quick loss, as one would expect. You don’t learn chess by reading about it, you learn by practicing it. Same things goes for just about everything else the author attempts, although he doesn’t fail in as obvious or spectacular ways.

What sort of knowledge, wisdom, insight, etc. does the author actually gain? Simply what I said, what we already know, but for which a demonstration or two can’t hurt: that there is no substitute for experience. That people don’t, for the most part, even respect “raw” knowledge, especially when it’s presented with the seeming attitude of just trying to show off.

Anyway, after reading this, I don’t have all that much respect for the author. (He spends the entire book talking about his failures, so some component of this is perhaps an unconscious perception I can’t help.) His one major achievement is that he did successfully read the encyclopedia, but for what? If anything, this book was entertaining, but that’s about it. Quick, fun read.

[<img[/img/book/WatershipDown.png]] Catching up on reading…

The best book about rabbits I’ve ever read.

Also, the best book about leadership I’ve ever read.

The author visits his old college professor who is dying of ALS, a disease of the nervous system which over the course of a year or two causes the victim to slowly lose control over his or her body, becoming a clear mind in an increasingly immobile and atrophying shell. The disease inevitably ends in death.

I haven’t read this (yet!), but the reviews of ”[http://www.amazon.com/Million-Random-Digits-Normal-Deviates/dp/0833030477/ A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates]” are pretty funny:

: A strictly “by the numbers,” formula-driven plot spoiled the ending…
Another:
: …with so many terrific random digits, it’s a shame they didn’t sort them, to make it easier to find the one you’re looking for.
Another:
: Although the plot was appropriately paced and the characterisation inventive, I found it hard to suspend disbelief in a couple of places, and frankly the sex scenes were awkward and clumsily written…

A “page-turner”; an exciting thriller built on an obviously impossible premise with one- and two-dimensional characters and a complex yet unsatisfying plot. All that said, I enjoyed reading Mr. Brown’s first “Robert Langdon” book, as they call this series after the hero-protagonist expert in historical art symbology. //The Da Vinci Code// had been recommended to me by different people on at least five occasions, so when I had the opportunity to borrow its prequel here, I eagerly accepted.

//Angels and Demons// starts out, on page one, with the following premise. Well, within Chapter One, I mean (or Chapter Two?), but I don’t hesitate to “spoil” this part of the plot because if you pick up the book and start reading, you’ll reach it pretty fast, anyway. Unless you don’t want even the first word spoiled (which is “The”, by the way), in which case retroactively stop reading before you get to this sentence. Or not, I don’t know if the first word is “The”. In fact I do have a pretty good hunch it isn’t.

The premise, then, is that a scientist has figured out a way to create unlimited quantities of antimatter and matter (in equal proportion) without using any energy. In reality (meaning, the world we live in) we can make antimatter, just as we can make matter, but it takes an incredible amount of energy. That’s “E=MC^^2^^” for you, which says that matter and energy are interchangeable and you can convert from one to the other. But since matter and antimatter tie up the same kind of energy, you can’t just pull them out of empty space. You might as well pull free energy out of empty space directly if you could do that. Create something out of nothing. Since we know you can’t do that (i.e., make free energy), in this universe at least, let’s say Angels and Demons is set in an alternate, non-parallel, (not even perpendicular) universe where one can just make free energy and get something out of nothing, suspend our disbelief like good readers, and move on from there.

So, it’s true that when matter and antimatter are combined, they annihilate each other and the energy contained is released (we, in our boring “conservation of energy” universe, have had to put that same huge amount of energy that’s liberated later into creating a tiny bit of antimatter, in the first place). So if you just so happen to have a way to make free antimatter, you can also build a sort of battery. Just combine the two whenever you need some power, and there’s your power (ignoring the steps involved in converting the heat energy to electrical or mechanical energy).

So a particular scientist (in his alternate universe) decides to pull a lot (a very visible amount) of antimatter out of thin air (vacuum), and then he decides to keep the globule of it hanging in a special storage device. The problem is that the antimatter can’t touch normal matter, so it needs to be contained by magnetic fields which suspend it in a vacuum.

Now, our scientist decides to make his antimatter containment device portable, which results in, as described in the book, something I picture as looking like a huge thermos crossed with an enormous hourglass. Why put all that effort into making this device portable? Why have it built with a battery inside, complete with a battery meter that counts down the exact number of seconds remaining in the battery’s charge, after which containment will fail? Why make it so the device can’t be plugged into a standard outlet to recharge the battery? Have you figured it out, yet? Yes, you’re smart. Plot: (1) Terrorists obtain doomsday bomb. (2) Bomb is counting down to detonation and can’t be stopped. The originality is overwhelming.

So, I kept thinking Hardy Boys, but then I realized the plot and style are more like those of a good Tom Swift, at least due to the pseudoscientific antimatter stuff. The mystery/chase aspect is Hardy Boys. Maybe a bit more complex. Maybe, let’s say: the substance of three Hardy Boys books crunched down into one, a pinch of Tom Swift, and an additional dosing of voilence/romance to facilitate an adult flavor. Shake (don’t stir) and voila! (Note: that’s not pronounced “viola”, if you’re not aware — it’s how “wah lah” is spelled.) Bear in mind, I once greatly enjoyed reading Tom Swift and Hardy Boys books back when I was little, and I bet they’d still be mighty fun to read, so I don’t say this to criticize, rather to elucidate flavor. Though Tom Swift was much more original, usually… But this is meant to be good adult literature?

Characterization is weak because, simply, the characters are not believable. Mr. Langdon (protagonist, do recall) is in a repeated state of shock, recoiling in horror or having his jaw drop to the floor with every new realization he makes or circumstance he encounters. The bad guy is not merely bad or misguided or conflicted in an interesting way, rather, just evil. The ultimate conclusion relies on those who have proven their intelligence and compassion throughout life acting in utterly stupid and un-compassionate ways, not meshing with my conception of reality as something plausible.

One instance where Mr. Langdon’s jaw drops to the floor in complete amazement (typical description; this is the flavor of the book’s words, remember) is when he sees people floating in an air silo, a tall cylindrical room with a jet engine at the bottom which blasts air upwards to allow those inside to appear to be floating. Even if I hadn’t seen a special about these on television about 15 years ago, that would hardly have been my reaction, let alone what I imagine to be that of someone who has presumably experienced much more of life than I have up to this point. So in the end, it’s hard to identify with this jittery easily-shocked protagonist as the hero of the story, let alone as a genuine person.

Although clearly the author put some research into the secret societies he details and the locations his characters visit, I didn’t feel particularly more educated by the end of the story. Further, the story made exaggerated claims about the supposed impossibility (many artists and scholars attempting this for years, etc.) of creating particular ambigrams (a coined term referring to words which can be read from different angles, in this case words that appear the same when flipped upside-down) referenced in the story, and yet the graphic artist who designed the images for the book apparently had no trouble. Further research on the Web reveals plenty of hobbyists who create and collect interesting ambigrammatic images.

In terms of an entertaining fast read, //Angels and Demons// isn’t bad. In terms of something cerebral, something that will teach you anything much about history, how the world works, how people interact; something that speculates about the future, makes an argument, or imparts knowlege: look elsewhere.