Book Review: The Information

I'd been sitting on the final chapter of James Gleick's The Information when I noticed in my Kindle app that I was coming up on a year since I'd started it. I made the final push today and finished it a year and a day after I first cracked it open.

It's a dense and broad-reaching book on information theory. The author covers a huge range of subjects in a pretty daunting level of detail. From natives using drums to communicate complicated messages, to the history of Babbage's analytical engine, to telegraphs, to information encoding in DNA, to quantum mechanics, to name only a handful of his long list of topics. It's not often I've seen such a broad range of topics covered so thoroughly.

While I really wanted to love the book, its strength is also it's undoing. For example, as fascinating as the working relationship between Babbage and Lovelace was, I'm not sure I needed that kind of detail (and it goes on for pages and pages) to get his point about the processing of information. In the end, the author is trying to cover too much. Some subjects are done superbly (like the Babbage-including one I just mentioned), but others are weak and confusing. Each subject not only gets a deep explanation (or an attempt at one), but also biographies of many involved. While I find these interesting, in this case it bloated the work.

After all of that, and after taking so long to read it, the main point was lost on me. I think the author is trying to say something about the accelerating pace of information and how our ability to deal with it continually adapts. However, the main point for me was lost in the deluge of information. Perhaps that itself was the point.

The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood

Book Review: Library - An Unquiet History

Library: An Unquiet History is a book about the history of libraries, but in a bigger sense about the history of the written word, and the way in which we've treated it, sometimes despised it, and sometimes tried to erase or otherwise shape our histories and our realities by the which in way we preserve it.

On the plus side, I learned a lot, and was also presented with a lot to think about in areas I'd taken for granted. The purposes libraries serve and have served change over time, for example, the ebb and flow of thinking in whether libraries are there to preserve as much as possible, or to filter and preserve only the best books. There are also great bits of history, ranging from the limited knowledge about how libraries of ancient scrolls were maintained two thousand years ago, to the efforts of Nazi-occupied jewish ghettos to maintain a library under occupation. There's also great bits of history and trivia about librarian education over time, how the Dewey cataloging system was invented, along with others, and much more.

Unfortunately the author has a very dry style and comes across with some degree of pretentiousness that made it a difficult read. As a result, I give this one a 3/5 kind of rating.

Library: An Unquiet History

Book Review: A Short History Of Nearly Everything

A Short History of Nearly Everything is a brief history of the physical sciences.

Bryson takes the reader through an introduction to geology, paleontology, nuclear physics, chemistry and a host of other topics. The book is both a crash course in how they work and fit together, as well as the history of each field.

The coverage is pretty lightweight (it would have to be, for this wide a set of topics) and humorous as Bryson pulls numerous memorable trivia and stories on the persons involved. Anyone who's a fan of James Burke (of Connections fame) will find this book to their liking.

 The only down side I can think of is that he goes on a tangent of doom-and-gloom for a while, which I found was laid on a little thick, but I still quite enjoyed the book.

 A Short History of Nearly Everything

Book Review: Benjamin Franklin - An American Life

When I read the Steve Jobs book a while back, a friend of mine remarked that he'd preferred the book on Benjamin Franklin by the same author, Walter Isaacson. I added it to my list and then ended up doing it as an audio book, covering the bulk of it this past week while at E3, as I was staying far out and had a lot of rental car time.

Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, like the Steve Jobs book, is a good introductory book to Franklin. A pretty thorough work in the account of his history and accomplishments, it doesn't excessively focus on any one area.

If there's any fault to it, it's that it doesn't do too much to get into Franklin's head and discuss emotional state, relationships with those in his family (e.g. it talks about his relationship with his wife but not the emotional state of that relationship). Now granted, in order to do so, I'd imagine some poetic license would need to be taken.

Franklin was an amazing person. Like many, he was not without flaws. Still, if you've read no other work accounting his history, this is a good place to start.

Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

Book Review: The Art of Video Games

Over the course of 2010/2011, I was privileged enough to be invited by Chris Melissinos to sit on the advisory board for the Art of Video Games exhibit he was putting together for exhibition at the Smithsonian. The exhibition opened a couple weeks ago and I was unable to attend the opening due to overlap with vacation plans, but I plan on visiting it sometime in May.

In the meantime though I got a copy of the book Chris authored in parallel with it, also titled The Art of Video Games and had a delightful time going through it.

The book is a large format hardcover coffee table book. It is liberal with spacing given to artwork, screenshots and whitespace and this makes it easy and fun to flip through. The games are broken up into different eras, loosely coupled with the "generations" of home consoles, though it also covers many PC games* from those same eras.

[*If I had any contribution to the exhibit, other than voting on the games with the other board members, it was in the debate for the inclusion of PC games to the list. A few of us (John Romero and myself were most vocal) felt that it was important to represent the symbiosis of development on closed platform consoles and open platform PCs (C-64, DOS/Windows PCs, etc - though the Apple II was a notable omission) and each has helped push the progress of the other. Chris agreed and that lead to the inclusion of a number of games from those platforms, including Jumpman on the C64 - itself likely responsible for consuming 1000+ hours of my youth.]

The treatment given each game focuses in part on the game's art and gameplay, and in part on why the game was notable or revolutionary for it's time.

The book also has a number of interviews with industry luminaries including Nolan Bushnell and others. These lend a bit of context to the mindset at the time, challenges in developing the games, etc.

Its a beautiful book that every gamer should have sitting on their coffee table.

The Art of Video Games: From Pac-Man to Mass Effect

Book Review: The Age of Turbulence

It took me a while to get through Alan Greenspan's The Age of Turbulence , but it was well worth it.

The book can be thought of as a combination of three things, in overlapping parts. First, Greenspan's autobiography, focusing on the parts of his upbringing and career that led to his chairing the federal reserve. Secondly, a modern history of economics, US economic policy and of the past seven presidential administrations with which he worked, and of his assessment of the state of international economics and its major players. Third, it serves as his assessment of where things are heading, reviewing the major drivers that in his view affect his forecast of the next twenty five years (through 2030 - the book was published in 2007)

One of the two things I liked most about the book as the behind-the-scenes look at his relationship with all the Presidents he got the chance to work with (Presidents Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II). He cites Clinton as the smartest, followed by Nixon (though he found him paranoid and with a worrisome mean streak), and he had some fairly scathing words for G.W. Bush and his policies erasing the budget surpluses that Clinton had helped grow.

The other thing I liked most was that I found the book to be a good crash course in world economics, given from the perspective of someone who developed relationships with many of the world's leaders and/or their chief economists. His view of the future may or may not be correct (see criticisms below) but his view of the factors shaping the future comes from a perspective few others can offer and seems to stand up to scrutiny.

The major criticisms of the book that most seem to raise come from two perspectives. First, he's an unabashed believer in free-market capitalism, and many think his ideology clouds his judgement. This may be the case, but regardless I think he's able to see things with some degree of objectivity. He is above all data-driven, which in most cases keeps his ideology in check.

That said, the second major criticism of the book, related to the above, is that his belief in minimally-regulated free markets, was a major contributor to the housing crisis of recent years, and that even at the time of writing as it seemed the economy was on the edge of a cliff, he didn't see it. This may be true, but I saw a silver lining in this aspect. It's in this aspect of the book that you can see confirmation bias at work, and I found it a sobering reminder than even those with deep expertise are susceptible - perhaps even more so - to such failings.

It's a pretty hefty book to get through but I thought it worth doing so.

The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World

Book Review: The Age of Gold

I recently got through the audio book version of The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream, and while it started out a little slow, it picked up partway through and there were a couple things I really enjoyed about it.

The book is a history of the California gold rush, starting with John Marshall's initial discovery in 1848, through the goldrush itself, and through to the construction of the railways connecting east and west coasts. The book presents the history by following several individual's stories, some of whom came overland, some of whom came by ship, crossing at the Panamanian isthmus. It ends by telling what became of all those individuals, ranging from cases where they ended up destitute to cases where they went on found lasting legacies (e.g. Leland Stanford went from mining supply sales to railroad tycoon to founder of Stanford University)

The stories the book tells have numerous humorous anecdotes and interesting factoids. For example, when mining companies started using nitro glycerin to blast through rock, the used Wells Fargo to ship it to them - only they didn't tell them WHAT was in the boxes they were shipping. After a few sudden disappearances of post offices, they decided it might be a good idea to disclose the contents.

What I liked best about it was that it connected various other pieces of American history that I've read about elsewhere. From some of the 49-ers following the Oregon trail, to the part California played in funding part of Lincoln's efforts in the civil war, to role the gold rush would have in America's support for the gold standard, for me this book was like that piece of the jigsaw puzzle that lets you connect two large patches you've been working on in isolation.

Finally, the author makes the argument in the end, somewhat convincingly, that the gold rush was a major contributor in forging the entrepreneurial spirit that would see America become the world's leading economy in the following fifty years.

The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream

Book Review: Churchill

Churchill by historian Paul Johnson is a biography of Winston Churchill that is a short, easy introduction to those wanting an overview of his life and accomplishments. It is far from an objective look, being high on praise and low on critique of the man. If you can look past the bias, it's an easy entertaining read.

I was familiar with the highlights of Churchill's time leading Britain during the second World War, but not of the rest of his career. Nor did I know much about his many accomplishments.

A few interesting bits:

• Early in his career, Churchill seemed equal parts opportunist and bad-ass. Having only mediocre educational achievement, he sought to make a name for himself in the military. He sought out (through influence of his family) opportunities to throw himself into any fight in which the military was involved. As a result, he earned 8 medals while fighting in Cuba, India, Sudan, South Africa and then leading a battalion on the western front during WWI. By opportunist, I refer to the fact that he doubled as a correspondent through most of this time, earning money by writing columns and giving speeches about his military exploits.
• He was a prolific writer, publishing over 15 million words in numerous books and articles. His work on the second world war won him the Nobel Prize in literature.
• He showed some savvy as to the publishing business as well. e.g. Post WWII, he struck a deal with his successor as Prime Minister to give him exclusive access to all military documents and exclusive use of them under some set of conditions. This put him at a huge advantage over other historians, and given that  Roosevelt, Mussolini, and Hitler were all dead, he was the only western leader left to publish his account.

A good short read, but best taken with a grain of salt, given the author's bias.

Churchill

Book Review: Alexander the Great and His Time

I was never much of a history buff in school, and so only had some passing knowledge of the history of Alexander the Great and the empire he created.

The author, Agnes Savill, does a decent job of covering Alexander's history both thoroughly and in an engaging style. If you are looking for an engaging summary of such, this could serve as the book to do it.

However, it should probably be taken with a large grain of salt. As I understand it, there are many points in Alexander's history that are debated. Savill claims to want to address these but so plainly gushes over any positive praise and so quickly dismisses any critical points of view, that she comes off as someone who is not only an Alexandrophile, but is so to the point of being incapable of listening to reason.

Alexander the Great and His Time

Book Review: The Age of Persuasion

Came across The Age of Persuasion at the library and picked it up. It was OK in some ways, poor in others.

The book is a history of modern day marketing, as seen through the eyes of an advertising copywriter turned broadcaster. It covers a lot of interesting history, rife with colorful examples, of advertising over the past century.

On the plus side, there are a ton of interesting factoids, and the authors seemed to have done their research. They cover the advertising side of the business and the factors motivating players in each strata of the business.

On the down side, there are three flaws I find with the book.

The first, which is minor and forgivable, and which can be seen by the cover art, is that the book is very much trying to ride the coattails of Madmen, focusing, and perhaps over-glorifying advertising's 'golden age'.

The second is that "marketing" is not the same thing as "advertising". If the book's tagline were "how advertising ate our culture", that'd be fine, but otherwise the authors perpetuate the myth that marketing is about ramming stuff down people's throats. It largely ignores the other half, which is figuring out what they want or need to begin with.

The third issue is that by seeing the world through an ad man's eyes, the book is too quick to ascribe too much value and too little blame to advertising in the influence that it has. Where they do cite negatives, it's always the other guys, the inept and evil ad men, not the creative good ones (which they likely include themselves in). I feel like it's really not so black and white.

If you can see past the negatives, there are some interesting data points and interesting bits of trivia here. Just make sure you take much of the book with a grain of salt.

The Age of Persuasion: How Marketing Ate Our Culture

Book Review: The Ascent of Money

Naill Ferguson's The Ascent of Money is probably best summed as one part history, one part crash course in finance and economics, and one part treatise on the fallibility and hubris of mankind. Another way to describe it might be as a cross of The Big Short with To Engineer Is Human, stretched out over a window of two thousand years.

The book gives a crash course on the history of finance, looking in turn at the advent - and roles of - currency, credit, banking, the bond market, the stock market, insurance, housing, and of course the intersection between all of these in things like derivatives, mortgage backed securities and the like. Each is examined from birth through to current day, as well as looked at in a global context.

Through it all, Ferguson gives a history of bubbles, from the "first bubble" in which an enterprising Scot bankrupted all of France in the early 1700's, through to the mortgage-backed mess the USA finds itself in today. Here is where I found a similarity with To Engineer is Human, in that it is a story of how we inevitably fail to learn from History. Perhaps it's more accurate to say that when we do, time and greed inevitably erode the safeguards we put in place.

This is what the book's closing chapter discusses, is whether such cycles are inevitable, and whether we do as much damage as we protect against, when we mess with the cycle of creative destruction.

While finance in general can be a bit dry, Ferguson does a good job of making this entertaining. The history of finance has no shortage of colorful characters and he introduces the reader to many of them. Even if you are not that enthused about the topic, it nevertheless will give a good overview of it that will entertain. Also, it serves to remind that the "current state of things" (i.e. the last 20 years or so, further back from which people have a tendency to subscribe to different rules) is by no means the way things must remain.

Finally, I'll add that the final chapter's coverage of reasons why people tend to predict the future of financial markets properly applies equally well to the tech industry as well. There are lessons to take away here that have less to do with dollars and more to do with our tendency to believe that "this time is different". If history shows us anything, it's that we repeat it.

The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World

Book Review: 1776

Maybe all you Americans learn this stuff in school while we Canadians are learning about fur trappers and maple syrup production, but I wasn't familiar with a lot of the details of the American Revolution. Certainly not the details of the tumultuous year of 1776, portrayed in nail-biting detail in David McCullough's book.

Not being familiar with the details of Washington's first year of the revolution, I had no idea just how precariously close the American's came to losing. The fact that they survived the year to go on fighting the British was a combination of several strokes of brilliant strategy, blind luck, and severe underestimation on the part of their enemy.

There are many lessons about leadership (good and bad) to be taken from both sides, but the main thing you'll get out of the book is a vivid sense of just how difficult the logistics must have been and how hard the conditions under which they fought. (e.g. To think that ten thousand men, stationed only a few hundred yards from their enemy, could in the course of one night pack up and sneak off without detection, boggles the mind)

If you like military history and stories of epic struggle, 1776 definitely meets the bill.

Book Review: Longitude

Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time

Wow did I enjoy this little gem of a book. A friend loaned it to me *months* ago (sorry Pete!) but it got lost in a pile of books somewhere and I only found it recently and got to it. Once started I tore through it pretty quick.

It is the story of the Longitude prize, the sixteenth century equivalent of the X-Prize, a handsome award offered by the British government to whomever could solve the problem of longitudinal location for purposes of sea navigation. For years people were able to calculate their latitude by comparing the angle of the north star to the horizon, but latitude – figuring out their east-west position on the globe - was a far harder problem, and people at sea that couldn’t calculate their location tended to also to do things like run into rocks and cease floating.

Specifically, Longitude is the story of John Harrison, a self-taught clockmaker that devo

ted his life – or at least 31 years of it, to the building of 4 clocks, the fourth of which would eventually win this prize, conquering the astronomers, changing the state of the art of chronometer making. In solving the problem, Harrison changed the ability of the British Navy to navigate the globe, and in doing so, its no exaggeration to say that he changed the course of history.

Despite this, it took him years to get the acknowledgement, as the book details the many years his efforts were thwarted for reasons of politics and greed.

Those looking for good business analogies will find a good metaphor for resistance to innovative approaches in the face of an assumed/established direction. (The clockmakers were regarded as 'mechanics' and the whole practice as folly by many of the astronomers, who beleived that like the north star's use for latitude, the answer lay in the clockwork of the heavens.

Amongst the coolest things I learned in this book is that of the 4 clocks he built, all four of which are located in the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England, three of them are still running today. Quietly ticking away, tended to only with a daily winding and occasional cleaning, almost 300 years after their construction. How awesome is that!? That museum is now on my list of must-see places.

Olfactory peripherals: This smells a bit familiar...

There were a few links around the web last week mentioning a research project out of University of Birmingham called "Scent Delivery System" or SDS. The researchers claim to have developed a system that allows some games (in their case, HL2 and Farcry mods) to deliver scents to the player after hitting certain trigger points. 

Some game sites linked to this as if to say "look what's right around the corner" (the researchers claim it could be gaming reality 2-3 years from now) and others to say "not so much".

Anytime there is new tech proposed, of any kind, there are enthused supporters and - usually outnumbering them ten to one - naysayers. As a general rule they are both wrong. The tech usually becomes feasible at some point, way beyond when the supporters claimed, and far enough out that the naysayers can claim they didn't beleive in it happening... then.

What surprised me about this round of 'smell-o-rama' write up was two things:

First, that the writers discussed how it could enhance realism, but none of the articles I saw discussed how it might enable new modes of gameplay. (Actually, I guess that shouldn't suprise me, but it disappoints a bit).

Second, that none of the write-ups discussed that we've been here before. About eight or nine years ago, a company called Digiscents was showing a prototype device and SDK at GDC (2001, IIRC). I got to play some of the game demos with the prototype and while I was skeptical for a bunch of reasons, I was still impressed. Many people think Digiscents' demise was an indication of the market's reaction to their tech, but I don't think we'll know, since the dot-com implosion dried up much of the venture funding at that time too.

But this post isn't about Smell-o-rama for games, and whether or not that could or should happen. 

My first point here is that when looking at new forms of technology, whether it be olfactory peripherals or the iPhone or whatever, and not asking "will it work with todays games?", though that might help deployment, but rather we should be asking "what has not been possible in games, that perhaps now can be?"

My second point is that like in other things, we should learn from history. Whether it be history of a particular piece of tech like in this case, or general models learned from elsewhere in history of technology deployment. 

[Update: Here's a great archived post from Internet Retailer from March of 2001 on Digiscents, their deal with RealPlayer to add scent to web pages, their deal with P&G. Ah... the bubble. :-)

More thoughts on the Flight Sim tragedy

I've exchanged a few calls & mails with friends at Microsoft following the layoffs they announced. It's one thing to read the numbers. It's another thing to talk to a friend that's suddenly worried about the mortgage, feeding the kids, etc. Saddening.

Regarding the teams and products affected though, Flight Sim in particular is a shocker. The claim is that MS is still 'committed to the product', but having laid off the Aces studio, and their ever-distancing from the Windows gaming effort, it's really hard to beleive. The weight of it hasn't sunk in until now as I read some of the blog posts about the implications.

As Steve points out, Flight Simulator was (until this week anyway), Microsoft's oldest product in continual development. It was a piece of gaming's history. The original IBM PC version was developed by subLogic and published by MS for the IBM PC back in 1982. It existed on other platoforms (I got started on the C-64 version) as early as 1980. Is there another game franchise with a 29-year legacy? There's a good history here.

Additionally, Flight Sim isn't just a game, it's a platform. It supports an entire co

ttage industry of third party add-on vendors ranging from military missions to air traffic AI to hot air balloon sims to a space shuttle simulator. Not to mention the hardware add-ons for people that want to do really elaborate rigs.

Anyhow. It's sad. 

What next for this space? there's an obvious vaccuum for one of the few competing products in the space to try to fill. Still a shame for MS to lose all that legacy though. Maybe they should sell the source and assets to another company? Maybe open source the whole thing?

Might be worth noting that when MSN Games cancelled Bridge, enough noise from a small but rabid group of fans, some of it directly to Bill, brought it back (though in a different form). Not sure that would work for FS though.

Hope something good is resurrected out of the ashes here.

Dvorak comic zine

While I've understood the (valid) arguments for using a Dvorak keyboard, I've never really been tempted to give it a try... until reading this awesome comic on the subject:

(via BoingBoing)

Don't know much about History...

In researching some stuff for work, I ended up out in the weeds a bit and came across two fascinating (and unrelated) bits of history that I highly recommend reading.

If they share anything in common, it's an element of 'strange factors and events in history have had ramifications on the way things work today'.

First up:

This Q&A with the author of a book on the history of counterfeiting, which goes quite a bit into the history of currency and banking in this country. Really interesting.

And secondly:

This overview of the Berlin Airlift, a pivotal point early in the cold war, and a logistics effort that would spawn techniques and devices still used in modern manufacturing and shipping today. I can't beleive this was never made into a movie!