Kinds of book reviews

There are a bunch of kinds of book reviews.

There are book reviews like the ones I write. When I write a book review, I'm just writing it for myself, because I feel the need to put down in words some thoughts about a book I read. I don't expect anybody else to read them, or find them worth reading, but sometimes they do. Many of the book reviews on a site like Amazon are like this.

But the majority of book reviews are part of the core functioning of the marketplace of books, to coin a phrase. Readers of books consume reviews because they are trying to find books they would like to read. Writers of books consume reviews because they are trying to understand what makes books work, or fail, and how they can incorporate that into their own writing. Publishers, distributors, catalogers and other middlemen and merchants in the marketplace of books consume (and sponsor) reviews because they are interested in the overall business of books: which books are popular and why? what needs are being met, and what are being overlooked? which opportunities for books are available, and which are over-saturated? etc.

I think that the vast majority, almost exclusively all, of the book reviews in the world, are one or the other of the above two kinds.

And increasingly, as the Internet dis-intermediates the marketplace of books, the above two categories are merging.

But there are, at least, two other kinds of book reviews.

One kind of book review is the "Important Person Making a Statement on Matters of Consequence, and Using a Book Review as the Vehicle." Think, say, of Seymour Hersh's recent Bin Laden bombshell. Or Leon Wieseltier's diatribe against technology.

Generally, these Deep Thoughts Disguised as a Book Review annoy me, and I give them a wide berth. But they are regular occupants of the world of book reviews, so I have to keep my eyes open for them and recognize them early enough to dodge out of the way.

A recent example of this (to me) is Cythia Ozick's observations on Harold Bloom's latest book: ‘The Daemon Knows,’ by Harold Bloom (titled "Shared Visions" in the print edition). Ozick clearly wants to be part of "the conversation" (the "Shared Vision") about Bloom's book:

If, as Emerson claims, the true ship is the shipbuilder, then is the true poem the critic who maps and parses and inhabits it? Can poet and critic be equal seers?

Ozick goes on:

It is through intoxicating meditations such as these that Bloom has come to his ­formulation of the American Sublime, and from this to his revelation of the daemon: the very Higgs boson of the sublime.

And later

So when Bloom tells us there can be no critical method other than the critic himself — meaning Bloom — we should not take it as blowhard hyperbole. With Emerson, he intends to pry open the unpossessed and to possess it, and to lead the reader to possess it too: a critical principle rooted in ampleness and generosity.

Uhm, I'm sorry: I'm sure there was something important being discussed here, but it was all "blowhard hyperbole" to me, like one of those dinner parties where, no matter how hard you try, the topic of conversation is entirely in an alien tongue (the "Higgs boson of the sublime"?).

Yet there is one final kind of book review.

This is the review where the reviewer is so passionate about the book, so entranced, so enthralled, so consumed, that all the reviewer can stand to do is to jump up, throw their arms wide, and shout out their joy at having found and read this book. Their passion and delight is brilliantly evident, and leaps out of the book review, drawing you in, infecting you with their own eagerness and joy.

These are the book reviews I always hope to find.

Such a review appeared recently, in the New Yorker, in Katheryn Schulz's review of Helen Macdonald's H is for Hawk: Rapt: Grieving with your goshawk.

Schulz describes her apprehension about the book, fretting that it would be, as Macdonald herself describes it, "the most appalling falconry bore":

Listen to her now, two pages in:

Maybe you’ve glanced out of the window and seen there, on the lawn, a bloody great hawk murdering a pigeon, or a blackbird, or a magpie, and it looks the hugest, most impressive piece of wildness you’ve ever seen, like someone’s tipped a snow leopard into your kitchen and you find it eating the cat.

So much for the falconry bore. Intellectually, Macdonald is unhurried—she pauses to point out whatever is interesting—but, stylistically, she is like this passage, all pounce. Over and over, her writing takes you by surprise: no sooner have you registered the kitchen than, whoa, there’s the snow leopard, its huge Himalayan paws leaving prints on the tile and half a domestic shorthair hanging from its mouth.

Yes! Exactly! This is how a reviewer grabs you by the shirt collar and shoves a book into your face, saying "Read! This! Now!"

And lest you worry that you'll be wasting your time with the book, Schulz is careful to alert you to the fact that this book is not just a joy to read, but worth reading, as well:

Macdonald, who is writing both kinds of book at once, makes neither mistake. She is intimate and moving on the anguish that carried her into the company of hawks, but the world of her book is like the world we really live in, crowded with humans and human ideas, and she turns on it all the triple perspicacity of a poet, a naturalist, and a historian. She dissects the cultural symbolism attached to hawks from Victorian England to the Third Reich; she catalogues the classic animal stories by gay authors, who could not write openly of their human relationships; she observes that when a species is endangered it suffers not only numeric but also semantic decline. “The rarer they get, the fewer meanings animals can have,” she observes. “Eventually rarity is all they are made of.”

It just so happened that I picked up a few other books first, but H is for Hawk is sitting there on my Kindle, waiting for me, and I know I'm not going to miss it; Schulz has made certain of that.

Some people say that the Internet is the end of reading and writing, and that all we can do now is formulate 140 character vocal burps and exchange pictures of kittens.

Which often seems to be closer to the truth than I'd like.

But then along comes Katheryn Schulz to arrest my despair, to keep me engaged, to draw me in, and to whet my appetite.

That, then, is the kind of book review that keeps me reading book reviews.

In which people discuss things I don't understand.

The discussion is certainly not boring.

• Socialize Uber: It’s easier than you think.

  Given that the workers already own all the capital in the form of their cars, why aren’t they collecting all the profits? Worker cooperatives are difficult to start when there’s massive capital needed up front, or when it’s necessary to coordinate a lot of different types of workers. But, as we’ve already shown, that’s not the case with Uber. In fact, if any set of companies deserves to have its rentiers euthanized, it’s those of the “sharing economy,” in which management relies heavily on the individual ownership of capital, providing only coordination and branding.

• How to Socialize Uber

  Uber promises investors it will soon be making mega-profits, but it also claims those profits just represent a return on its technology and risk-bearing. Certainly the money doesn’t come from exploiting Uber’s workers. What workers? No, no — you see, the drivers are merely Uber’s business partners, and you can’t exploit your business partner.

• Once a sure bet, taxi medallions becoming unsellable

  In an April letter to creditors, New York taxi commission officials and other stakeholders, Freidman's attorney, Brett Berman, called on industry regulators and medallion lenders to restructure and extend loans for his client and reform the industry.

• Billionaire hedge-fund manager says Uber told him it might cut driver pay ‘because we can'

  "'You've got happy employees, you've got happy customers, you've got happy shareholders. The holy triumvirate are all really excited about your company. Why are you going to risk that and push the employees salary down 5%?'"

  Callinicos simply responded "because we can."

• Elizabeth Warren: No Need to Stop Uber-ized Workforce, but Must Invest in Education

  she returned to her argument, made several times during the interview, that the government’s position should pour more investment into education and infrastructure. “We have to invest in the two places where it works,” she said. “We have to invest in brains and people who are willing to do the long, long arc research.”

• This lawyer fought for FedEx drivers and strippers. Now she's standing up for Uber drivers

  By using contractors instead of employees, companies are not responsible for things like payroll taxes, job expenses, anti-discrimination protections or overtime pay. For bootstrapped startups, it's a cost-saving measure that can mean life or death.

  But Liss-Riordan isn't drinking the same venture-capital bought kool-aid as the startups who have built businesses around the 1099 economy. Rather, she views it as another example of companies using contract workers as a way to skirt their obligations as an employers.

  "I don’t believe this industry needs to be built on a system whereby the workers don’t need to receive any of the protections that we have a society that workers need to receive," she said. "I just don’t know how Uber can argue with a straight face that as a $40 billion dollar company it can’t afford to insure its drivers, pay minimum wage or pay overtime, or be reimbursed for their expenses.

• Uber Isn’t the Problem

  If drivers on the Uber platform had better options available to them, if there were jobs that offered them higher wages and better working conditions, they’d presumably have already taken them. That means that if you’re appalled by Uber, your real problem is with every other option that the drivers who use it have for earning a living—which is entirely fair. But despair over the fact that many American workers aren’t commanding the wages and working conditions we’d want for them in an ideal world doesn’t seem like a sound reason for shutting Uber down, or regulating it out of existence.

Stuff to read as May turns to June

Mother Nature apparently thinks that May is turning to April, or maybe March. But that's OK, too.

• Internet Trends 2015

  Consumers’ Expectation That They Can Get What They Want With Ease & Speed Will Continue to Rise...

  This Changes Fundamental Underpinnings of Business & Can Create Rising Demand for Flexible Workers

• Using Computer Vision to Increase the Research Potential of Photo Archives

  Collaborating with the Frick Art Reference Library I utilized TinEye’s MatchEngine image similarity service and developed software to analyze images of anonymous Italian art in their photo archive. The result was extremely exciting: it was able to automatically find similar images which weren’t previously known and confirm existing relationships. Analysis of some of the limitations of image similarity technology was also conducted.

• A Toolkit to Measure Basic System Performance and OS Jitter

  To complement the great information I got on the “Systematic Way to Find Linux Jitter”, I have created a toolkit that I now used to evaluate current and future trading platforms.

  In case this can be useful, I have listed these tools, as well as the URLs to get the source code and a description of their usage. I am learning a lot by reading the source code, and the blog entry associated.

• Systematic Process to Reduce Linux OS Jitter

  Based on empirical evidence (across many tens of sites thus far) and note-comparing with others, I use a list of "usual suspects" that I blame whenever they are not set to my liking and system-level hiccups are detected. Getting these settings right from the start often saves a bunch of playing around (and no, there is no "priority" to this - you should set them all right before looking for more advice...).

• New C++ experimental feature: The tadpole operators

  Visual Studio 2015 RC contains a pair of experimental operators, nicknamed tadpole operators. They let you add and subtract one from an integer value without needing parentheses.

• The tadpole operators explained

  The __ENABLE_EXPERIMENTAL_TADPOLE_OPERATORS is just a red herring.

• ​The Counselor

  In March 2015, I&A commissioned authors to write a series of narratives that investigated near future concerns around intelligent systems in warfare, urban design, medicine, and labor. These stories served as the centerpiece of a two-day intensive forum bringing together participants to identify the core set of challenges that consistently arise in deploying intelligent systems regardless of arena. "The Counselor," by Robin Sloan (Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore) focuses on the persuasive qualities of these systems in the medical context.

• Is there a way with Git to make future merges ignore version number difference in a pom file between branches?

  I am trying to find a way to make Git ignore pom version differences between branches. This works well in Perforce and I'm not having any luck reproducing the behavior with Git.

• Post Traumatic Crash Disorder & the 1962 Flash Crash

  The enormous impact of 1929 and the Great Depression had outsize and lasting effects that haunted investors decades later.

• Soccer Superpower

  The economic might of the United States in international soccer has indeed been realized: American sponsors, broadcasters, marketers, and apparel companies have funneled billions of dollars into the game; a pro league is thriving; millions of Americans watch European matches on television; and hundreds of thousands will attend European exhibition games on U.S. soil this summer. But the soccer cronies who have fed at the revenue trough didn’t anticipate the consequences of courting all that American money: It gave America the power to bring them down.

• Everything You Need to Know About FIFA’s Corruption Scandal

  The Justice Department’s announcement primarily cites deals between FIFA, sports marketing groups, and broadcast corporations for the television rights to air the World Cup and other international soccer tournaments. Dating back to 1991, the indictment alleges, those involved conspired to receive bribes from marketing firms in exchange for exclusive television contracts—to the cumulative tune of more than $150 million. As Attorney General Loretta Lynch stated, “It spans at least two generations of soccer officials who, as alleged, have abused their positions of trust to acquire millions of dollars in bribes and kickbacks.”

Warriors advance again!

For the first time in the 30 years that I've lived in Northern California, the Golden State Warriors are in the NBA finals!

The series against Houston was funny: there were 3 very close games and 2 massive blowouts. For some reason it felt like the series against Memphis was more challenging for the Warriors; I think that was partly because Houston was exhausted after the effort they had to produce to get past the Clippers, and partly because the Warriors, being a very versatile team, match up better against Houston, who have trouble adjusting as rapidly to different styles as do the Warriors.

Now comes their hardest test, playing the Cleveland Cavaliers and LeBron James, who is as dominant and magnificent an individual player as has ever existed in the NBA, at least since Wilt Chamberlain was playing. (Pretty-well-known trivia fact: when Wilt Chamberlain scored 100 points that strange night in Hershey Pennsylvania, he was playing on the (Philadelphia) Warriors team.)

Although the media will be all about Stephen Curry vs. LeBron James, that's not really how the finals will play out.

The real issue will be LeBron James versus the Warriors defense, which means the players you need to start getting familiar with are the ones you might not have paid so much attention to: Draymond Green, Andre Iguadala, Harrison Barnes, Festus Ezeli, Klay Thompson.

There is no single player who can come close to guarding LeBron James, but the Warriors don't play defense with a single player, so I think there is hope.

We'll have to wait a week to see; the finals start Thursday, June 4!

A collection of John and Alicia Nash articles

Some of these, in particular the Peter Woit article, have some wonderful additional contributions in the comments sections.

And thank you to those authors who took the time to recognize that there were two very special people in the back seat of that taxi.

• John F. Nash Jr., Math Genius Defined by a ‘Beautiful Mind,’ Dies at 86

  Dr. Nash’s theory of noncooperative games, published in 1950 and known as Nash equilibrium, provided a conceptually simple but powerful mathematical tool for analyzing a wide range of competitive situations, from corporate rivalries to legislative decision-making. Dr. Nash’s approach is now pervasive in economics and throughout the social sciences and applied in other fields as well, including evolutionary biology.

• John Nash 1928-2015

  During the years I was a graduate student in Princeton, Nash was often to be seen, especially in the mathematics/physics library, and I talked to him a few times. The first time was when he stopped me one day, told me he had seen my name on the physics department picture board, and was curious about the origin of my last name.

• John and Alicia Nash, 1928,1933–2015

  Alicia’s life was one of boldness and courage from the day she emigrated with her family from El Salvador in 1944. Her father had followed her uncle fearing backlash against their aristocratic family from a popular insurrection. Hearing about the nuclear bomb on the radio inspired her to become an atomic physicist, and she worked hard to become one of only seventeen women in MIT’s class of 1955.

• John Nash, mathematician portrayed in A Beautiful Mind, dies in taxi crash at 86

  Nash describes thinking himself out of his illness.

  “After my return to the dream-like delusional hypotheses in the later 60s I became a person of delusionally influenced thinking but of relatively moderate behavior and thus tended to avoid hospitalization and the direct attention of psychiatrists,” Nash wrote.

  “Thus further time passed. Then gradually I began to intellectually reject some of the delusionally influenced lines of thinking which had been characteristic of my orientation. This began, most recognizably, with the rejection of politically oriented thinking as essentially a hopeless waste of intellectual effort.”

• John Forbes Nash, 1928–2015

  On the evening before the award ceremony John Nash was introduced to World Chess Champion Magnus Carlsen. You can watch a video of the encounter in this NRK report. Nash says that he encouraged his son (who was also diagnosed with schizophrenia, to play chess and asks Magnus whether he thinks the game could be good for mental health. "I think it keeps the mind active, I suppose," replies Magnus, who goes on to sign a chessboard for Nash.

• Eisgruber: Princeton saddened over reported deaths of John Nash and wife

  The University community is "stunned and saddened" upon hearing news reports that Princeton mathematician John Nash and his wife, Alicia, were killed in a traffic accident, President Christopher L. Eisgruber said Sunday.

• A Beautiful Mind, an Amazing Couple: Community Mourns the Loss of John and Alicia Nash

  It was common for Princeton area residents to see John Nash taking his beloved Dinky train between his home in Princeton Junction and downtown Princeton. At 86, he was still a daily fixture on the Princeton University campus and was often seen in the Princeton U Store.

• The Lost Years of a Nobel Laureate

  Then came what Professor Kuhn calls "a miraculous remission." And as happens, for reasons unknown, in the case of some people with schizophrenia, it was not, according to Mrs. Nash or Mrs. Legg, due to any drug or treatment.

  "It's just a question of living a quiet life," said Mrs. Nash.

  The most dramatic sign of that remission, perhaps, is that Mr. Nash was able to do mathematics again.

• Nash and the NSA

  Not only did John Nash think about computation and cryptography, there are many ideas in these letters that were a bit ahead of their time when Nash sent these letters in 1955.

  • Expressing a cryptographic process as a Boolean function with input bits.
  • Breaking the cryptographic system as a function of the key length.
  • Exponential in key length as computationally hard and polynomial in key length is computationally easy.

• National Cryptologic Museum Opens New Exhibit on Dr. John Nash

  The National Cryptologic Museum's newest exhibit, "An Inquisitive Mind: John Nash Letters," features copies of correspondence between Dr. Nash and the National Security Agency (NSA) from the 1950s when he was developing his ideas on an encryption-decryption machine.

I don't take taxi rides often, but I must try to train myself to put on my seat belt even in the taxi.

Sigh.

Stephen Curry is playing at an astonishing level

I was never a good basketball player, but I love to watch the game; I think it is the best televised sport.

And Stephen Curry is playing at a simply astonishing level.

The last time I saw a player playing at this level, it was 1991, and his name was Michael Jordan.

They're very different players, but Curry is really doing something remarkable.

Oh, and by the way: Curry's current coach, the one who seems to have figured out how to elevate Curry's play that final little bit until he's truly above and beyond anyone else around him on the court?

None other than Steve Kerr, who was Jordan's teammate during the great "3-peat" years of 1995-1997.

Astonishing talent, coupled with a superb coach: total joy to behold.

This is why sports, when it finds that magical something, is the most fascinating entertainment.

Stuff to read, late May edition

Happy Memorial Day, a little bit in advance.

• Silicon Valley Is a Big Fat Lie

  What was once a land of upstarts and rebels is now being led by the money-hungry and the unspirited. Which is why we have a start-up that mails your dog curated treats and an app that says "Yo." The brightest minds in tech just lately seem more concerned with silly business ideas and innocuous "disruption," all for the shot at an immense payday. And when our country's smartest people are working on the dumbest things, we all lose out.

  That gap between the Silicon Valley that enriches the world and the Silicon Valley that wastes itself on the trivial is widening daily. And one of the biggest contributing factors is that the Valley has lost touch with reality by subscribing to its own self-congratulatory mythmaking.

• Google systems guru explains why containers are the future of computing

  Inktomi and also early Google ended up using essentially a Unix process model and doing everything in terms of processes, running many processes on the same piece of hardware. In fact, Google didn’t use virtual machines really at all until it started doing some corporate stuff where it wanted to run third-party things. But all the internal stuff never used VMs.

• A Repository with 44 Years of Unix Evolution

  The evolution of the Unix operating system is made available as a version-control repository, covering the period from its inception in 1972 as a five thousand line kernel, to 2015 as a widely-used 26 million line system. The repository contains 659 thousand commits and 2306 merges.

• Microsoft, Salesforce talks fizzled over price: Sources

  The deal envisioned Microsoft using a significant portion of its $95 billion cash pile to pay for Salesforce, but there was discussion of allowing Benioff to roll his 5.7 percent stake in Salesforce into Microsoft stock, while other shareholders would have gotten paid in cash. Benioff would have had a management role at Microsoft under the deal, according to people close to the talks.

• Top 10 data mining algorithms in plain English

  Once you know what they are, how they work, what they do and where you can find them, my hope is you’ll have this blog post as a springboard to learn even more about data mining.

• Why should I have written ZeroMQ in C, not C++ (part I)

  While the possibility to handle the exceptions differently in different contexts may seem appealing at the first sight, it quickly turns into a nightmare.

  As you fix individual bugs you'll find out that you are replicating almost the same error handling code in many places. Adding a new function call to the code introduces that possibility that different types of exceptions will bubble up to the calling function where there are not yet properly handled. Which means new bugs.

• Why should I have written ZeroMQ in C, not C++ (part II)

  The real reason why any C++ programmer won't design the list in the C way is that the design breaks the encapsulation principle: The implementer of the "person" class has to know that its instances will be eventually stored in "people" list. Moreover, if a 3rd party chooses to store it in a different list, the implementation of the person would have to be change. This is an anti-pattern that OO programmers learned to avoid.

  However, if we can't place the "prev" and "next" fields into "person" class, we have to put them elsewhere. Thus, there's no other option but to allocate a helper object, the way std::list<> does.

• Don’t Stack Your Log On My Log

  Our work investigates the impacts to performance and endurance in flash when multiple layers of log-structured applications and file systems are layered on top of a log-structured flash device. We show that multiple log layers affects sequentiality and increases write pressure to flash devices through randomization of workloads, unaligned segment sizes, and uncoordinated multi-log garbage collection. All of these effects can combine to negate the intended positive affects of using a log.

• How Could a Flash Cache Degrade Database Performance Rather Than Improve It? Lessons to be Learnt from Multi-Tiered Storage

  Contrary to intuition, host-side flash caches can degrade performance rather than improve it. With flash write operations being expensive, cache hit-rates need to be relatively high to offset the overhead of writes. Otherwise, the end-to-end performance could be worse with flash cache.