February 2012 Media Thread

This is more of a community thread than rationality training. (Suggest you add the "community" tag.) But that might be fine. Let's see what happens.

For anyone who hasn't read it, I just started Adventures of a Curious Character, by Richard Feynman. It's pretty fantastic - not much about rationality - but it's quite funny. He tells one story of how he made his fraternity brothers at MIT look really dumb. One of them asked if French curves were made in any special way. Feynman told them that French curves are specially made so that the tangent at the lowest point is always horizontal to the ground. Of course, this is obvious for any point that the tangent (derivitive) at the lowest point (minimum) is zero. But the guys didn't realize that this was definitional and raved as though Feynman had made a brilliant explanation of French curves.

I read Principles of Product Development Flow recently and was very impressed. It gave me a mostly new, significantly orthogonal perspective with which to view the processes resulting in shipped code. The book, summarized, is:

• Let's apply queuing theory to software development!
• If you learn nothing else, remember to reduce/control/watch/cost your queue sizes before other things you think are bottlenecks
• Translate benefits and costs approximately into dollars. Especially the delay costs of a product sitting in a queue. You will likely be surprised.
• Also here are dozens of more fine-grained considerations and interventions like how to push costly variance to someplace less costly, keeping superstar developers at lower load so they can firefight at whim, and the fact that variance isn't always bad like it is on a factory floor.

I'm currently about half way through Pinker's "The Better Angels of our Nature", and I'm enjoying it very much, though I'm taking the exact numbers with a grain of salt after seeing some criticism of his scholarship that looks solid enough to me.

I fill my phone with books. (So yeah, I'm paying £20/mo for an MP3 player and book reader that occasionally annoys me with phone calls.) Mostly nonfiction.

I've just finished Actually (the last collection of essays and reviews) by Christopher Hitchens. A doorstop, a lot of which is still available on the original magazines' sites. Patchy - quite a lot was clearly dashed off in half an hour after a boozy night out, and he was brilliant but skated by on brilliance rather too often - but ultimately worth ploughing through. I would recommend the curious start on better Hitchens (god is not Great, Hitch-22, Letters To A Young Contrarian in that order) where he wasn't phoning it in.

The nice thing about books of reviews is pointers. So right now I'm on Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West, the 2007 Penguin edition with a lengthy intro by Hitchens. The book is a doorstop-sized travelogue of Yugoslavia in the 1930s, a subject I have little interest in; I'm bothering only because a literature fan like Hitchens raved about it. And so far it's page-turningly good.

I've also just finished the audiobook version of god is not Great, read by the author. A book so clearly written to be read out loud. If you liked the book, I most strongly recommend the audiobook. Even if you dislike audiobooks, as I do.

Homestuck. Four and a half thousand pages of it. I'm wondering if Andrew Hussie has somehow worked out how to make a manic phase last six years. I need to go back and reread it, when I have way too much time on my hands.

And the Brainbent AU, which is just heartwarming.

(I am assuming that comics can go here as well) Neil Gaiman's "The Sandman" is incredibly well written, and also has characters with a positive spin on immortality. Beautiful art, great story, it's a gem. "The Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer" is a manga with a standard plot (group of mostly teens with magical powers must save the world) which subverts your expectations in a big way. If you like manga, anime, or just fantasy adventure stories, you will absolutely love this.

It's old school, but Haruki Murakami's work is pretty much the best fiction I've read since American Gods. The Wind-up Bird Chronicle has a pretty good translation, and once you've read that the callbacks in Haibane Renmei start making more sense. Also 1Q84 (Q = kyuu = 9) is out, but I haven't read it yet.

David D. Friedman has written a bunch of blog posts promoting his novels Harald and Salamander. Both of these significantly draw on economic concepts, although in very different ways. Harald is a historical novel, albeit one which is set in a fictional universe. Salamander (available in a Kindle version) is especially interesting in that it realistically portrays both a form of magic and characters conducting empirical research to extend their magical abilities.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein's "36 Arguments for the Existence of God". Easily one of my top-10 favorite books ever. Beautifully written and hilarious (a particularly difficult combo for an author to pull of, IMO), a non-linear, recursive loop through the lives of several atheist characters who are inextricably tied to religion in one way or another. The author has quite an interesting life history: philosopher, biographer of Gödel and Spinoza, famous novelist, currently married to Stephen Pinker, among other things.

I'm reading some of the Nebula/Hugo award-winning SF novels of (mostly) the last few years; so in the last couple of months I read (lightly plot-spoiling, but not too bad):

• Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl - a 'biopunk' novel, set in 23rd century Bangkok, in a world where a couple of mega-corps (mega-Monsanto's) have screwed the whole eco-system, and made the world dependent on their bio-engineered calories (where are very hard to come by). The story is interesting, switches between the perspectives of different sides, including the one of a come-alive Japanese love doll. While I liked that, the whole tech/bio background did seem very improbable. Still, liked the book
• Scalzi's Old Man's War series. There are 4 books -- it starts with a bunch of old people that undergo some rejuvenation treatment, and end up in a whole lot of wars with alien races all over the reachable universe. The rest of the books discuss various aspects of the wars, the people involved, colonization, etc. Overall, I Iiked the stories, but I did not like the melodrama Scalzi put in at various places. And there were too many story lines (secondary, but still) that never got resolved. (e.g., the werewolfs). Tech-wise, of course everything is pretty advanced -- but then his weird limitations, very convenient for the plot...
• Haldeman's Forever War (1974) is somewhat of a granddaddy to Old Man's War, following some guy's interstellar military career; it's inspired by the writer's Vietnam experiences. Overall, enjoyable (dated fairly well, although some of the 'future tech' is pretty common today...).
• Just started with Connie Willis' Blackout); about a bunch of future historians time-traveling to various episodes in World War II. So far, the hints to the concepts behind time-travel seem a bit...questionable, but let's see what's still to come...

I'm hesitant to recommend this, since I'm sure everyone has heard it/likely started reading it when they were young adults, like I did, but I thought Inheritance (The final book in the series that spawned from Eragon, if you didn't know) was a pretty good ending to the series. Pretty light reading, and not too insightful, but very good, if you like fantasy type books (as is the entire series, of course).

At the end, (Not really a spoiler, don't worry) there was a brief discussion about immortality, which was the only time an LW trope was really touched on. I was really hoping he would come out and take a strong pro-immortality stance, but he didn't really. It was something to the effect of "I wouldn't want to keep living after 2-3 thousand years".

It contains one of the better attempts at depicting an Unfriendly Optimisation Process I've seen in commercially-published fiction.

Got my attention there. Thank you for the recommendation. I barely got through the first episode (little girls), but ended up caring to a surprising degree starting with episode 3.

The one thing that kept getting on my nerves, though, jnf ubj gur tveyf arire nfxrq nal onpxtebhaq dhrfgvbaf hayrff gur cybg erdhverq gurz gb. Rfcrpvnyyl "jub gur uryy ner lbh naljnl, Xlhorl?" juvpu fubhyq unir unccrarq cerggl zhpu vzzrqvngryl.

Ohg V ng yrnfg cnegyl punyx vg hc gb uvaqfvtug ovnf, qhr gb zl univat fcbvyrq zlfrys ybat ntb ol ernqvat nobhg gur fubj ba GIGebcrf, abg gb zragvba univat orra jnearq nobhg travrf ol Ryvrmre.

Gur guvat V rfcrpvnyyl rawblrq, ba gur bgure unaq, jnf abj aba-nagebcbzbecuvp (ernq: perrcl) Xlhorl jnf. Fbzr bs gur "jr qba'g qb guvf rzbgvba guvat" fghss jnf hapbaivapvat naq V guvax vg pbhyq unir fgvyy orra qbar zhpu orggre, ohg vg'f fgvyy fhcrevbe gb gur onfvpnyyl uhzna nyvraf V'z hfrq gb va cbchyne svpgvba.

EDIT: Hah, I like this piece of Buddhism from fans of this show:
"Vs lbh zrrg Xlhorl ba gur ebnq, XVYY VG JVGU SVER."

Let me just say that PMMM was everything that was good about Evangelion without any of the bad.

I nearly posted exactly this earlier today.

It's an excellent show, though don't expect too much rationality. Madoka is no HP:MoR, but since there is very little rationality-relevant content in anime it does stand out.

For me it was a case of two independent interests unexpectedly having some crossover. As a fan of SHAFT (the animation studio) and mahou shoujo in general, it was a given I was going to watch Madoka. Then fhcreuhzna vagryyvtraprf naq vasbezngvba-nflzzrgevp artbgvngvba?

In a classic mahou shoujo setup like this, with magical powers and wish-granting etc, an obvious-to-LWers objection will be "Why doesn't someone just wish for no one to suffer/die ever again?". Certainly MoR!Harry would have handled this world a lot differently. I was expecting to just have to live with this oversight in an otherwise impressively coherent setting. But I think by the end of the show even that can be justified if you really want to, based on Xlhorl'f ercrngrq qrprcgvbaf (naq gurersber gur pbzcyrgr ynpx bs perqvovyvgl bs uvf pynvzf bs hayvzvgrq cbjre gb tenag jvfurf), gur rkgerzryl lbhat cebgntbavfgf, naq gur nccnerag "ehyr" gung gur zntavghqr bs gur jvfu qrcraqf ba gur qrcgu bs srryvat naq qrfver sbe vg. Madoka is not MoR!Harry, after all.

V erpnyy gurer jnf na rkcyvpvg be vzcyvpvg yvzvgngvba gung n jvfu zhfg pbafvfg bs bayl n fvatyr (uggc://cflpubybtl.jvxvn.pbz/jvxv/Cebcbfvgvba)[cebcbfvgvba]. Guvf vainyvqngrf nal jvfu nybat gur yvarf bs, "[Znqbxn'f jvfu (V sbetbg gur fcrpvsvpf)] naq sbe rirelbar gb abg qvr!"

Ubjrire, V'z fher gur ynggre cebcbfvgvba UC:ZbE!Uneel jbhyq ybir. Lrg va beqre gb fhpprffshyyl ranpg UC:ZbE!Uneel'f qrfver, bar jbhyq arrq gb jvfu sbe fbzrguvat yvxr, "Va nyy irefrf, V jvfu sbe crecrghny lbhgu nsgre qrirybczrag gb bar'f culfvpny cevzr juvyr qrngu rkvfgf abg."

V'z abg fher ubj bar pna sbezhyngr gur jubyr pbaprcg vagb bar cebcbfvgvba - bar nyfb arrqf gb pynevsl gung pbzcyrgr vapvarengvba jbhyq fbzrubj nyybj sbe erpbirel; bgurejvfr bar jbhyq fbzrubj rkvfg nf nfurf va gur jvaq.

Znlor, "V jvfu sbe anabgrpuabybtl."

Rira gura bar zvtug jnag gb fcrpvsl gung gurl jvfu sbe vg gb unir orra qrirybcrq fbzr zvyyravn ntb, gung gurl jnag vg gb or va hfr gbqnl, naq gung gurl jvfu sbe vg gb or va hfr ol uhznaf - abg whfg Vaphongbef.

Colossus was surprisingly good, thanks.

I assume you mean the extended version? I wouldn't have described the original this way, but the one additional scene makes a difference.

I started playing this game thanks to you and was addicted immediately. I just woke up after having dreams about Dominion, after playing 35 straight games in a row with no breaks. I may have gained the ability to play basic games subconsciously.