Category Archives: Reading

Amazon: Renting textbooks

Amazon Launches Kindle Textbook Rental Service, Allows Students To Store Notes In The Cloud | TechCrunch.  This is huge.  If it takes off properly, it could make Amazon a whole lot of money.

There are some books I would have liked to rent rather than buy, and I’m sure the service will be popular.  The bigger picture is a larger library of academic books in the Kindle system.

Finally, annotations in Kindle to this degree indicates a tablet-oriented system, since the current Kindle doesn’t do an amazing job at this.  Mirasol or some other display technology, and touch + stylus seems imminent.

Gaia as our evolution: a highly networked system

Dunbar’s number is an oft-referenced aspect of human interactions.  Essentially, our brains don’t comprehend much more than 150 people under a certain context.  We just can’t count much higher.  Seeing as how there are over 6 billion people alive today, even with an increase in a couple orders of magnitude this is a hugely limiting factor.

Our evolution

After reading through the entirety of the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov, I’m rather convinced that he understood our limits as humans.  Asimov was a chemist and a biologist, and while much of the former shows up in the I, Robot stories, the concept of Gaia in Foundation is his vision of the latter.

Gaia is an imagining of a world where humanity’s limited connectivity does not exist. All beings on the planet are intensely aware of everyone and everything around them.  Put in Internet terms, it’s as if our species rocketed forward in the same way as we have gone from the telegraph to TB/s of bandwidth and beyond.

Increasing scale

If we continue the metaphor between computer networks and networks of people, our goal should be to reach across our biological boundaries in order to connect and sympathize with a larger set of people.

Networking isn’t easy.   This applies for humans as well as it does technology, though we’re a lot more apt to point out limitations in things rather than ourselves.

We might talk a lot about Twitter or some other Internet property going down; it’s nearly always posed as having a negative and significant impact.  ”Othering” of individuals or groups has many more serious repercussions, yet that’s often under the radar and out of the realm of public critique.

The Big Short

I’ve now read a number of different books about the 2008 financial crisis, and today I just finished The Big Short by Michael Lewis.  Now that I’m done, I have to say that this is the one to read, if you’re at all interested in the subject.

It’s clear enough to me that Michael Lewis understands the financial systems, and he knows the history since he was a part of it back in the 1980s.  What’s good about The Big Short is that it inspects the confusing language of these strange financial products and describes them as what they are: games of chance.

CDS, CDO, short, long; these abbreviations and words are all over most every page.  It can be a bit tricky to put together at times, since Lewis does get into a reasonable amount of detail and history behind these different varieties of shit-soup.

In summary, the point which the book makes is that despite making millions of dollars, controlling incalculable amount of money, and eventually getting reimbursed by the government, the people who run Wall Street are monumentally stupid.  While playing a number of games in order to shift the books around and create a lot of money for themselves, practically no one could see that huge amounts of predatory loans wouldn’t eventually crash down on top of them.

The Big Short is a beautifully written book, and the fury and frustration of the few who actually were in the know are front and center along the dystopian (yet very real) journey.  Please, read it, and then pass it along to a friend.

Looking Backward: forward thoughts

I recently went back to the 1888 novel Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy, which I read bits of in high school.  For those who don’t know, the book is an imagining of a utopian, Marxist future, from which the main character looks back to the “bad old days” of capitalist inequality.

As for the book itself, it certainly is in a world of its own.  Bellamy’s conception of the future is quite unique, and deeply re-thinks our relationship to labor, society, and economy.  It does seem like the general media today is getting further and further from these concepts, which in many ways makes it a breath of fresh air.

I will say, too, that while I did make it through the audio book rented from the local library, I would say that any other method of consumption is probably preferable.  The female voices are spoken in a strange falsetto which gets old very quickly, and his affectations are tiring at best.

Warehouses and Tubes

Aside from the politics, Bellamy predicted some interesting technological progressions which we basically have today.  First, Bellamy replaced retail shops with storefronts which are just places to browse products and place orders.  Utilizing a series of tubes, the packages are ordered, charged to your account, and sent to the home directly from the warehouse.  In essence, this is the Internet with Amazon, minus the physical shopping locations.

For a while now I’ve thought that Amazon should take this extra step.  Namely, one large advantage of retail shops at this point is that you can see the products in the flesh rather than a series of low-resolution images.  Especially with phones with web and Amazon app access, it’s easy enough to compare what you see in Best Buy and have it sent home from the Internet store.  It might be nice going forward to have a better physical store where the display units actually work and you can set an appointment to inspect the items you’d like to try, and I think Amazon still has a prime opportunity to do it.  It is overhead, of course, but it’s a thought.

Internet radio

Another aspect I thought was neat from Looking Backward was in predicting Internet Radio more than a hundred years before its inception.  Sure, radio came not too long after the turn of 1900, though Bellamy’s vision was that phone lines would offer customized streams of music, with all varieties of music, offered at any time of the day.

Conclusion

OK; so maybe these predictions weren’t so crazy.  Even so, I enjoyed the book a lot despite the odd narration, and it’s worth a visit if it doesn’t sound too caustic to your political soul.

Thousand Splendid Suns

After reading The Kite Runner, I eventually made it through the second book, A Thousand Splendid Suns.  It took me a long while as it’s hard to describe the text without using the word “painful” and, perhaps, “horrifying.”  The story follows two women in Afghanistan in roughly the same time period as the first book (1980s through the early 2000s) .

It’s safe to say that the woman’s life in that society was not an easy one by the account in this book.  Yes, this is a work of fiction, though I’m certain that any aspect has been lived with only slight variation by many people.  Said shortly, people can be fucking ugly and horrible to each other, and that half of our species can be outcast and lowered in the way that they were in this book is at times eye-opening.

With that said, it can be a bit tricky in reading this text to conflate the horror with the culture of the country.  I get the feeling that some Americans reading the book think that all non-Christians are monsters, and that we’re better simply because we’re Western and not-”them”.  In many ways I’d prefer a text that is a bit more careful of these issues, or to supplant the situations with a bit more context.  I can imagine reading the novel is a starting point for these conversations, and I’d be interested to hear what others think who have read its pages or lived in the referenced culture.