Books this year: a book diary

This is a story about bomber pilots fighting in a war. It’s a really good story about a guy named Yossarian’s struggle to avoid death by avoiding his duties as much as possible. He pretends to be sick sometimes, or goes off to Rome where there’s an apartment soldiers can stay with whores.

It’s written in a smooth, butterlike style. It’s really a joy to read, and the characterization is great. Highly recommended.

This is a selection of writings from three great stoic writers, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, and Seneca. Most of the writings are excerpts, primarily because the authors repeated themselves a lot, and I think the only complete work is the Enchiridion of Epictetus.

I always enjoy a little stoicism, but I found most of this stuff pretty dry. I think Seneca’s De Ira is a masterpiece, but they didn’t include much of it. So I guess I would say going to the originals is probably better in my opinion, though I wouldn’t really know.

I got this book for Christmas one year along with quite a few others. I told my mommy that she could look on my Amazon Wish list if she wanted to know what I wanted and my parents bought me a ton of books. It was a really awesome time.

It took me a long time to get around to reading the whole thing. The bulk of the book is fairly detailed projections of a variety of aspects, centrally brain scanning and life extension.

Kurzweil seems pretty confident about most of his predictions. He gives margins of error, but they aren’t very wide. In 50 years, we’ll know if he was way off or not. Basically, he believes that the growth in technology is accelerating at such a pace that we will be able to scan our brains into computers in 20 years or so and that in this way, we will essentially conquer death. Then, only a short while later, the entire universe will be permeated with information. There’s a lot of other details I’m leaving out, but these two strokes of transhumanism and singulitarianism I think are the two most important.

I myself essentially buy everything that’s said in the book. Though many of the details of how these transformations will be effected are necessarily unknown at this time, this does not imply that a belief in their occurrence is simply blind faith. This however, is the point I have the greatest trouble with. Kurzweil answers the criticism from Malthus simply by saying that when a limit is reached, new paradigms will be found. The trouble is, we sometimes don’t know what those paradigms will be, or more often, don’t really know for sure if we can bring them about or how. For example, quantum computation is theorized to be practical, but we don’t know how to do it or even if we really can. Kurzweil answers these criticisms with a faith that we’ll figure it out. And he thinks that this faith has great historical justification.

There are a lot of other writers and speakers on the subject of the singularity. I myself haven’t perused a lot of the literature, but I have enjoyed the things Ken has forwarded me and the Singularity Summit talks I’ve seen.

I’m generally not a fan of short stories, but I decided to give these a try because I really love this author. It was definitely a nice surprise every time one of the stories had ties with Macondo. It was kind of like unexpectedly getting to say hello to an old friend. A lot of the characters you read about in Marquez’s novels have a way of haunting you, and I was very surprised that he manages to do that even in his short stories. From the ill fated couple in Eyes of a Blue Dog to Innocent Erendira and her heartless Grandmother I was riveted. Definitely something worth reading, and something I’ll probably read again.

This is the thirteenth novel in Pratchett’s Discworld series. It is the story of a slightly stupid monk named Brutha. Brutha’s job and greatest joy is working in the monastery’s vegetable garden, a place where food grows in the ground as slowly as a thought grows in his mind. However, fate had much bigger plans for Brutha than growing lettuce.

When the tortoise first started speaking to Brutha, he assumed he was going crazy. When the tortoise started telling him that it was actually the Great God Om, Brutha assumed he was being tempted by a demon. When his faith was strong enough for him to accept that the tortoise actually was the Great God Om, Brutha began the transformation from simple minded gardener and novice monk to the greatest prophet his faith has ever known.

Shortly after Brutha began carrying around a tortoise and speaking to it he was chosen by the head of the Omnian question, Vorbis, to accompany him to the neighboring town of Ephebe. He was chosen because even though he had never learned how to read and really hated to think, he was gifted with an eidetic memory that Vorbis thought would come in handy. They were going to Ephebe because there was a group of people there who were worshiping the Great Tortoise, because they believed the world was a flat disc riding on the backs of four giant elephants, which were in turn riding on the back of an even more giant tortoise. This seemed insulting to the Omnians, because they believed the Great God Om was the only real God, and that he would never manifest as something as lowly as a tortoise.

While in Ephebe, Brutha and Om became acquainted with three philosophers, and while talking to them Om came to the disturbing realization that even though many people worshipped him out of habit or due to fear of the Quisition, Brutha is the only person left who truly believes in him. This was a problem for Om because a god’s manifestations and powers are dependent on the number of believers they have, and if anything were to happen to Brutha, he would fade away. Fighting broke out between the Omnians and Ephebians, and Brutha memorized many scrolls from Ephebe’s extensive library before escaping in a boat. Brutha and Om wound up trekking back home through the desert with a badly injured Vorbis, and Om spent many anxious hours protecting Brutha from the various small gods floating through the desert looking for someone to believe in them. Once they came to the edge of the desert a recovered Vorbis tried to kill the tortoise, abducted Brutha, and rushed to Omnia to be declared the eighth Prophet.

Back in Omnia, Vorbis ordered Brutha to be publicly burned for heresy on the back of a brand new torture device that looks like a giant turtle. At the last possible moment, Om fell from the sky onto Vorbis’s head, killing him instantly. Upon seeing this miracle, many people began to once again truly believe in Om and he became powerful once again. He then named Brutha the eighth Prophet and allowed him to establish the new Church doctrines. Together they avoided war between Omnia and Ephebe, and Brutha lived on for another one hundred years, turning what was supposed to be the bloodiest century in Omnian history into a century of peace.

I guess what you get out of this novel depends on how you choose to look at it. Some people think it’s purely a fun read, some people think it’s a commentary on today’s religious disagreements, and some people think that whatever it was meant to be, it was horrible. I enjoyed it, but I wouldn’t use it as a way to frame my opinions of real world religious dynamics. Another good thing about it is that even though it is a part of the Discworld series, you don’t have to know any of the Discworld culture or backstory to enjoy it, so if you are wanting to familiarize yourself with Pratchett’s books it’s a good one to try.

In the beginning of this book, Marquez writes a note stating that while working as a cub reporter in 1949 in Cartagena, Colombia, he was asked to cover the emptying of burial crypts in a historic convent. While witnessing the events, he says that “the stone shattered at the first blow of the pickax, and a stream of living hair the intense color of copper spilled out of the crypt…attached to the skull of a young girl.” This discovery reminds him of a story he learned from his Grandmother about a twelve year old marquise with long hair who died of rabies from a dog bite and was venerated in several Colombian cities as a miracle worker. According to the wikipedia article for this book, there was a different, less interesting source for this story, but I like the way that the note in the beginning of this book sets you up for the story that follows.

That disputed author’s note serves as a springboard for the haunting story of Sierva Maria de Todos los Angeles, the daughter of a spineless, fearful marquis and his drunken, drug addicted wife. The parents hate each other so much that they hate their own daughter because they can see each other in her. They send her to live with the slaves and she becomes enamored with their lifestyle, moving around silently (even when her mother forces her to wear a bell around her wrist), worshiping their gods along with practicing Catholicism, and lying just as easily as she tells the truth. One day when one of the servants takes her with them to the market she is bitten on the ankle by a dog. It is just a small wound, so the servant dresses it and sends the girl on her way without even thinking to tell her parents. The next day, the servant returns to the market and sees that the dog had been killed and hung up to let people know that it had rabies. Everyone then becomes consumed with the fear that Sierva Maria has the disease. From then on, things just keep getting worse for the poor girl. Even though she never shows any signs of rabies, she is subjected to so many different treatments that what was once a healed wound became a festered sore that she couldn’t even walk on. A doctor befriends her father and treats the girl, but says that there is nothing that can be done.

The local Bishop summons the girl’s father to his home and tells him that he believes the girl is possessed. After a while, the father decides to listen to the Bishop and has his daughter committed at a local convent. The nuns and the abbess immediately start attributing every bad thing that happens in the convent on Sierva Maria. She fights them, tears up her cell and her clothing, and becomes little more than a wild animal in response to their treatment. Then the Bishop sends his personal librarian to be the girl’s exorcist and from there everything begins to change. The priest makes sure the girl is treated humanely, and she begins to respond to him. Eventually, the priest and the girl fall in love. It is fascinating to watch the love story between the two characters unfold, and heart breaking to see all the obstacles that come between Sierva Maria and any form of happiness. Once again, Gabriel Garcia Marquez has crafted a unique and entertaining story that will linger in the minds of its readers for years to come.

I am somewhat ashamed to admit that I saw the movie long before I read this book. I’m kind of glad that I did though, because even though the movie was okay on its own merits, if I had been comparing it to the book I would have been bitterly disappointed. Gaiman has said that Stardust is actually a prequel to a book that may very well never be written, and I find that very intriguing.

The hero of Stardust is Tristran Thorn, from the small English village of Wall. Wall is a town that borders on the magical land of Faerie, and the gateway between Wall and Faerie is guarded at all times. Except, of course, for once every seven years when people come from all over England to be allowed to cross through the Wall and into the Faerie marketplace. Unbeknownst to him, Tristran is the result of a chance encounter between his father and a mysterious woman at one of those market places. When he was born, he was pushed through the gap in the wall with a note, and since there were only restrictions on people going into Faerie and not coming out, he was given to his father.

One day, while trying to convince the girl that he loves to marry him, Tristran notices a falling star. The girl tells him that if he brings back the star, she will marry him. Tristran goes off to retrieve the star, and is allowed to cross the wall into Faerie to find it since that is where he came from. Unfortunately, bringing home a falling star is easier said than done. Not only are there witches trying to find the star too, the rules of everything in Faerie are different and hard for Tristran to comprehend. It also doesn’t help that the star actually turns out to be a woman, and she doesn’t want to be rescued.

Gaiman has altered his style in this book in homage to the old fairy tales that were the inspiration for it, but his personality comes out in the humor and the ridiculous escapades in this book. It is a fascinating, vividly described story full of intriguing characters and whimsical turns of plot. Very entertaining, and a must read for anyone who is a Gaiman fan.

This book is a concise history the Muslim world, spanning from Muhammad’s Revelation in 610 AD to the present day. It follows all of the caliphates, the civil wars, and the differences between Sunni and Shi’i and the reason for the initial split. It shows the rise and fall of several Muslim empires, and draws stark differences between Muslim society now and the ideal society dreamed of by Muhammad. It also shows the difficulty of transitioning the Muslim world from an agrarian society to a western one, and how different the Islamic ideal of democracy is from the Western ideal. The book is extremely informative, and I learned a lot of things about Islam that I didn’t know before. However, I wouldn’t recommend that you read it unless you are extremely interested in learning about the subject, because I found the way that the information was presented to be really dry and very trying to get through in a lot of places.

Wow, what a wonderful book, and one that I’ve been looking for for a really long time. I long suspected that there was no real reason to believe the Copenhagen Interpretation, but one can easily see that just by looking up the fact that there are competing interpretations floating around. However, I also long suspected such things as that there might be interpretations that don’t involve a collapse, and that there was some kind of weirdness afoot with quantum mechanics being deterministic and random at the same time. This book showed me that my suspicions were correct.

There are 2 parts of quantum mechanics, the dynamical equations of motion which are completely deterministic, and the collapse which is probabilistic. Nobody has ever provided any way of determining when this collapse occurs. The problem of doing so is called the measurement problem, and was first elucidated by the great John Von Neumann. As some of you might have suspected, things like the “consciousness causes collapse” idea are completely speculative.

You’ll often hear people, sometime very eminent ones, making statements that the world is essentially random, and that that has been proved by quantum mechanics, which will never be overturned. It is true that most people suspect that we need a theory that makes the same predictions as quantum mechanics does. This suspicion is fueled by a very precise and unfailing accuracy in all of the predictions quantum mechanics has ever been asked to make. (People will probably only start allowing themselves to consider looking for theories that make different predictions if quantum mechanics starts making erroneous predictions, and nobody expects that to happen.) However, there are interpretations of quantum mechanics that don’t involve a collapse of the wave function, and there are other complete theories that make the same predictions as quantum mechanics, notably Bohm’s theory. These theories, because they only rely on the dynamical equations of motion of quantum mechanics, are completely deterministic.

One thing that everyone needs to know is that the Many Worlds interpretation has very serious problems. Hugh Everett III’s paper did not actually specify the Many Worlds interpretation, the Many Worlds interpretation being just one interpretation of Everett’s paper. It could also be read in such a way as to suggest that the collapse is a delusion that the dynamical laws can be shown mathematically to bring about in us. One of the most damning things about the Many Worlds interpretation is that the separate worlds that are actually generated depend on the basis in which one writes down the universal state vector. And quantum mechanics, like most mathematical theories, is invariant with respect to basis. For example, whether I specify a vector with polar coordinates or Cartesian ones, it’s still the same vector, even though I’m choosing to use two different point-sets to describe it. Nobody has come up with any way of finding some sort of canonical basis which we can use to tell which worlds are actually coming in to being, so to my mind Many Worlds is nonsensical (i.e. not well-defined). Some attempts to figure out how to construct a preferred basis have been made since the publication of this book (1994), but I haven’t evaluated all of them. Most of them have smackings of anthropomorphism, which strikes me as not the best direction to be going. As of 2001, the problem had still not been solved.

Another interesting thing that one can show is that any theory whatsoever that does not involve collapse will not be distinguishable by experiment from any other of the theories that don’t involve collapse. This means that if collapse is ever shown to not happen (and this is difficult but possible and also what I happen to believe), then there are widely varying metaphysical interpretations, each one of which is completely untestable even in principle.

In short, you can’t even begin to understand quantum mechanics until you’ve read this fascinating book.

In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard examines the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac, in which Abraham was instructed by god to kill his son Isaac. He argues essentially that there can be no ethical justification for filicide in the context of the story, and that in fact faith rather than ethics can be the only justification.

There’s also a response to the Hegelian notion that one can somehow go “beyond” faith by studying philosophy. To my mind, it’s always been obvious that no satisfactory logical proof has been found for or against God, but I guess people really wanted to look for one for a long time, so they lost their objectivity somewhere in the process.

I really liked the idea of The Knight of Faith, i.e. someone who trusts that good things will come to him on the strength of the absurd. I think I live this courageously sometimes. I have ventured to consider the possibility of achieving things that it would be absurd for most people to even consider achieving. And further, I have then been successful. This is one of the reasons I count myself luckier (but also braver) than everyone else.