Obsolete Your Idols

Approximately fifteen years ago, several friends of mine told me I absolutely needed to read a book by John Steakley named Vampire$.  Then they told me I needed to read Armor, by the same author.

Maybe you’ve noticed, I’m kind of slow.  I’m a slow adopter of technology,  philosophies, mindsets and habits.  So I just now read Armor.  I’m not exactly sorry I waited, but I probably would have been just as happy to have read it 15 years ago.  Sorry, Aaron.  Sorry, Jim.  Sorry, Uriah.  You guys were right, I should have leapt at the chance.

Be that as it may, maybe you haven’t read Steakley, yet, either.  I’m here to tell you that you probably should, if you are looking for a certain kind of experience.  Do you like James Bond movies?  Die Hard movies?  Did you like Forever War at least as much if not more than Glory Road?  Then this book is for you.   It is one man’s story, launched into without any past, any sense of what drives him, in the brutal face of endless war.  It’s got bureaucratic SNAFUs, it’s got dark humor, it’s got graphic fight scenes.  Then in the second part, we get to see the rest of the world from another point of view, more fun, less brutal.  Then it all knots back together at the end.

It’s probably technically space opera, it’s combat fetishizing, and it moves at a high speed pace.

Who might like this book

• Fans of:
  • Harrison’s Bill the Galactic Hero
  • Resnick’s Santiago
  • The first Zelazny Amber book
  • The aforementioned movies and books I compared it to
• People looking for something fast to stuff in their pocket and take on a short plane flight
• Players of FPS games

Who might not like this book

• People who can’t read past typographical errors, the copy editor seemed to be asleep on this printing
• People who want a richly detailed background  and snort at testosterone blurred scenes
• Pacifists, romantics, deconstructionists, and faith-based intellects

I still haven’t read Vampire$, by the way.  But it’s on my shelves, now.

Traveling today.  Going someplace with below freezing temperatures for the first time in a year.  Send hot coffee.

This is the better Tufte book, Visual Explanations. It’s short, concise, clever, superbly polished and easier to get my mental hands around.  It’s most everything you needed to learn from The Visual Display of Quantitive Information but in bite sized chunks.  Accessible throughout and visually striking at points, this is a thoroughly enjoyable book.

It presents some very good and very bad examples of how to present explanations, well, visually.

Short, fast read and highly recommended.  I won’t bother itemizing why, because I think this is a book everyone should at least look at and many should read.

I read two Tufte books back to back and this is the one I read second.  It’s a book about, you guessed it, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.  Feel those upper case letters of importance.  This are serious book.  Yeah, it’s about that dry.  Which is not to understand its importance.  For people who need to persuade with numbers and pictures, this is The Book to have read.  But actually reading it?  It’s kind of boring.

I want to contrast this strongly with the other  Tufte book, which I’ll talk about later.

This particular book was weighty and meaty and covered a lot of territory and buried a lot of good points in here but holding them all in my head was an ordeal.  I think this is the book you put on your work bookshelf or home coffee table to let people know that, hey, you know why PowerPoint sucks and, yeah, range frames are the bomb.  It’s like the Mason sign or the Oddfellow’s shake or the Turtles passphrase.

So a good book to own, a good book to have, in the past, read.  Will you re-read it?  Probably not.  You might not even finish it the first time if you have, oh, a television.  Or a spouse.  Maybe a really cold beer.

Who might like this book

• UI designers
• graphics wonks
• number nerds

Who might not

• people prone to innumeracy
•  tactile thinkers
• the lowbrow crowd

Leaves on Brick

Originally uploaded by Binder Of Daemons

It’s not fall, but the leaves seem to have come down in heaps in the last couple of days. This is after someone came through and blew away most of them with a blower.

I finished reading my first book by Eco yestereve,  Foucault’s Pendulum.  This is another one of those books where my co-workers, seeing me read it, had opinions about it.  My boss loves it and the CEO has re-read it several times.  Contrariwise, another co-worker hated it.  This isn’t the first time I’ve tried to read Umberto Eco, but it’s the first time I finished.  Perhaps, like Catch-22, I needed to age into it.  It’s got a lot of things I enjoyed in The Illuminatus! Trilogy and I can see where it would lend itself to increased enjoyment with re-reading.

One frustration I had with it is that parts of it are in languages I don’t read and, in fact, it was originally written in a language I don’t read, giving me the impression that there’s much more going on there in the text than I can understand.  If I re-read it, I’ll have to do it with  different dictionaries, one for Italian, one for French, one for Latin.  Ideally I’d learn Italian and read it in the original but I don’t know if there are enough years left for that.

The story itself is structured as a pair of nested flashbacks and there are other flashbacks embedded inside of it.  The core conceit of the work (the Plan) is that it’s constructed through a randomization of text fragments, strikingly like the reputed method PKD used when writing The Man in the High Castle, so there’s another literary parallel which I found enjoyable.   Ultimately, though, I wasn’t as happy with the shaggy dog story flow where it all boils down to “bad things are going to happen because people are gullible”.

What I liked

• whirlwind tours of occult history
• characterizations of minor characters, thin and sharp as a thumb’s nail
• presentation of alternative explanations for history’s events
• references and call-outs to other works I’ve read

What I didn’t

• sometimes hard to follow conversations in languages I don’t read
• not a real sense of closure at the end of the story

Who might enjoy this book

• occultists, diabolicals, fans of conspiracy for the sake of conspiring
• members of spiritual knighthoods
• late modernist readers who like texts they can deconstruct and still have something left to hold
• polymaths and multilinguists

I think I spend the weekends much more in passive consumption mode and so I write less original stuff and spend most of my time off reading feeds, sending stuff to delicious, to my Powell’s wishlist, to my tumblelog and just grooving on all the wonders of the internet.  With that in mind, here’s probably the best of the best of what I read this weekend online.

• LOLCODE for the Parrot engine
• OXYPHENBUTAZONE (probably requires you to have a Facebook account and possibly the Scrabulous app to view)
• The time has come to push the button. 
• Prison daycare 
• Spider-Man: One More Day.  WHAT.

Which now has me thinking that I should put together a page sharing all the social places I frolic for those who like that kind of thing.  Kind of like the footflare I used to have on the blosxom blog.

By belated request of randomlife, I’ve added CoComment support to my blog.  Try to contain your enthusiasm.

Crusts

Originally uploaded by Binder Of Daemons

If I squint really hard, these elements look like a face.

There are a number of people who make predictions for the coming year.  If they predicted events for the previous year, they’ll review them, score themselves on their accuracy.  Often they find that they’ve done about as well as a coin flip.  Which brought me the idea of making predictions which were exactly coin flips.  For each of these, I’ve constructed them as an A or B choice and flipped a Missouri state quarter to determine my prediction.  At the end of the year, or perhaps at the start of 2009, I’ll review and see how accurate the coin was, and whether the representative of Missouri did better than the average coin flip.

After the 2008 elections:

• the President will be a Democrat  (Republican)
• the House of Representatives will have a (Democratic) Republican majority
• the Senate will have a Democratic (Republican) majority

During 2008:

• The price of a PlayStation 3 will (remain stable) fall
  
• Nintendo Wiis will remain scarce (become abundant)
• One Laptop Per Child will thrive (fade into obscurity)
•  Amazon’s Kindle will (catch on) fade away
• George R. R. Martin will (will not) complete the Song of Fire and Ice
• An earthquake of at least 7.0 magnitude will (will not) hit the Bay Area
• A flu pandemic (will) will not afflict America

There you have it, ten predictions from the most sage quarter I could find.  Predictions are in bold, anti-predictions are in parenthetical notes.  Check back in a year or so to find out how well this quarter did.