Lamarr's invention, which she developed with her music composer neighbor George Antheil, came about through an odd inquiry. Lamarr was interested in a boob job and Antheil had written about early efforts in that area, again presaging another important intersection of Hollywood and technology. After numerous discussions, the couple got down to some serious inventing. Eventually, the duo went on to get a patent in 1941 for a new technique for frequency-hopping radio communications. While not taken seriously at the time, it ultimately was deployed by the military in the 1960s during the cold war. While the technique involved piano rolls, the basis of frequency hopping continues to be used as part of spread-spectrum radio communications that are in common use today. Along the way, Lamarr made many movies (although none quite as provocative as Ecstasy, the one cited earlier) and married and divorced six husbands, one of who was a Nazi arms merchant that got her interested in developing new technology for the war effort once she fled to America. She lived to be honored by the Electronic Frontier Foundation a few years before she died in 2000. Rhodes' book is the first detailed recounting of her various inventions with Antheil.

It is hard for many of us to grok a movie star with her trips to the patent office, but she was the real deal. Rhodes is the author of many intriguing history of science works, including the story of the Manhattan Project, and his new book is worth reading.

Lamarr once said that "Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid." She was anything but.

Stephenson is well known for two rather different milieu: near-future tech-heavy worlds that could be short-handed as cyberpunk and the 16th century European and Near Eastern world of his Baroque Cycle, with the Cryptonomicon and Anathem as bridges between the two. The excellent REAMDE is different. It's about a very recognizable here and now.

Csonger, the Hungarian hacker working for Russian mobsters; Richard, the former dope smuggler who launched a hugely popular game in the vein of World of Warcraft; Sokalov, the former Russian spetsnaz soldier-turned-bodyguard; Olivia the Chinese-British M16 agent, Zula, the Somali refugee-turned Iowa farm girl, Marlon the Chinese hacker - and the list truly does go on and on - are all either interesting or likable, often both.

Outlining the plot of a 1,000-page novel in any detail would be ludicrously reductive. Let's just say that Richard's niece Zula is kidnapped to hack the solution to the eponymous virus engineered by Marlon that is holding a Russian mob boss's files hostage and the subsequent journey moves from the Pacific Northwest to southern China to the Philipines and back to the U.S.

Pace, character, connection to a world the reader can empathize with, color and wonder, the story has all of these things.

REAMDE does not have the heft of some of his novels. It is, in fact, a spy caper in contemporary tech clothing. Post-ending, you wind up cocking your head at recollections of certain elements and events. But my overall take: it's an easy, compelling read. And in a world of small beer, his willingness, even in what amounts to a cockeyed spy novel, to tackle such a complex story in such a global context is whiskey.

The technological aspects of the book are interesting to those of us who are already interested in such things. To a non-tech reader, they would read through them. Either way, they are fuel for the human story.

Long ago I figured out that every news story I wrote was simply this: people, in places, doing things. In REAMDE, there are a lot of empathetic (and repugnant) people, in a James Bond-level of (regardless of where you're from) exotic places doing a lush lot of things (including tech things).

Stephenson photo by Jean Baptiste

Cyrus Farivar has done much the same thing with his book, "The Internet of Elsewhere: The Emergent Effects of a Wired World."

Instead of focusing on the capital of the Web, Silicon Valley, or even on one of the Silicon Valleys outside of the original, like Bangalore, India, Farivar has taken a look at our wired world through the lenses of South Korea, Senegal, Estonia and Iran.

There is a tendency to think of the Internet as being a priori and sui generis. This is a new world so powerful and so game-changing that it effects history and culture, no matter where one stands. Farivar's argument, and it is a well-made one, is that like any other element of the human experience, the Internet is effected by history and culture. If we ignore that fact, if we let ourselves believe that the Internet, not history, is more of a determining factor in our future, we are liable to be surprised by it to an excessive degree.

Each of the places he covers are important to our understanding of the Internet because their histories and cultures have influenced how they have embraced it. In a way, the countries he has chosen to profile are reflections of each other, Senegal of South Korea and Estonia of Iran.

South Korea

South Korea has innovated two things: professional gaming leagues and citizen journalism. With a block on much of the tech coming out of Japan (given how Japan treated Korea in World War II the restrictions are many), Korea's game of choice is StarCraft. Ohmynews was like a new planet when it burst on the scene in 2004.

Both of these things are direct results of the history of Korea, that is, its past (its geopolitical position and struggle with Japan) and its present, where it is one of the greatest providers of free broadband Internet access to its citizens.

Senegal

Although Senegal is the most wired country in Africa, it does not have the infrastructure in Korea, meaning that most computing is done inefficiently in Internet cafes. Like Korea, the country's leadership is pro-Internet and focuses a great deal of attention and emphasis on it. But this attention is top-down and insufficiently distributed. No matter how much a country's upper echelons believe in something, if they do not have the capacity to make it possible for everyone to contribute to building that belief, there is a good chance it will die. Even if it does not, it is destined to stagnate, or at least plateau.

Despite being a politically stable, relatively prosperous country, Senegal's reality is Africa's: a raft of intelligent, interested people working against a history of compromised infrastructural elements.

Estonia

Where Korea has widespread, fast and reasonably-priced broadband, Estonia has widespread, fast and reasonably-priced (often free) Wi-Fi. This in part explains the success of Estonian companies, with Skype in the lead, only 20 years after the fall of the Soviet Union. The half-century occupation left Estonia an apparently broken country.

But its history of facing, and considering itself part of, the West, was not easily expunged. When the opportunities were available again, mostly when the obstacles were removed, Estonians went crazy innovating Web tools and companies. Now it has one of the highest rates of Internet penetration in the world, as well as a lot of time to make up. Like South Korea and Senegal, this access to an almost complete national Wi-Fi blanket is both an expression of citizen will and an expression of political will at the highest levels.

Iran

Although China probably has to receive the Palm D'Or of online repression, Iran is competing in the same league. Using the same combination of tools pioneered by the Chinese - laws, social checks and technological filtering - Iran's Internet has been rendered a third-class communications network. The Iranian leadership recognized early on that they had a citizenry with a long history of intellectual and technological competence and that the Internet was going to prove important in the future. Members of the Iranian leadership began to utilize social media to promote their points of view and continue to do so today.

Big Three

The three big ideas I took away from this book were these.

1. History matters. As "disruptive" as web technology is, the history of a country or region, right down to the present moment, profoundly and tangibly affects how that place and its people will respond to that disruption. Farivar did a particularly good job of outlining the relationship between each of these countries' histories and their relationship to the wired world.
2. Political will. The will of a country's leadership is important but it is not enough. The innovation of a ruling group must either reflect its people's will, or inspire their imagination.
3. Opportunity. Human beings are experimental and (in the broadest sense) entrepreneurial. If their impulse toward giving the Web a go are checked, due to lack of connectedness, unaffordability or overt limitation, it will check intellectual and financial prosperity. Individuals, whether app programmers in Senegal or dissidents in Iran, will move forward, but the society as a whole will not.

Kelly's book is a must read for technologists and anybody interested in the future of the Web. In this post I'll explore a few of the main themes of the book, in particular as they relate to the evolving Web. (there won't be any spoilers, for those of you in the middle of reading it or if you haven't yet read it!) Two of the main themes are how technology will evolve and how we - humanity - can guide it and make the best use of it.

The Technium: a Living System of Technology

Key to the book is a new term that Kelly invents: the technium. He spends about 6 pages explaining the term, but at it's most basic it means a system of technologies. It includes not only what we ordinarily think of as specific technologies (such as cars, radar, computers), but the entire system around technology - culture, art, social institutions, "the extended human" and more.

A key to grokking the technium is that it's a living system, which evolves in a similar way to humans. On page 45, Kelly explains that "the technium can really only be understood as a type of evolutionary life." He goes on to suggest that technology evolves in a mix of inevitable and chance ways, just as humans have done. His point being that we can fairly accurately predict the macro evolution of the technium (that computers will eventually acquire a level of intelligence akin to a human, for example), but not the micro details of that evolution.

We've been writing about the Internet of Things, when real world objects become connected to the Internet, for the past couple of years on ReadWriteWeb. Kelly's book reinforces what a profound change in the Web this is. As everyday objects get connected to the Internet, they almost become 'alive' to us. They might not be able to think for themselves, yet, but billions of 'things' in the world will be able to sense and compute information about the world.

Living With Technology's Increasing Power

On page 254, Kelly writes that "technologies are nearly living things." So we will need to adjust to this and figure out how best to utilize - and live with - technologies. Kelly lists five "proactions" that humanity should take to assess and engage with technologies:

1. Anticipation
2. Continual Assessment
3. Prioritization of Risks, Including Natural Ones
4. Rapid Correction of Harm
5. Not Prohibition but Redirection

At one point he compares technologies to children. As parents we aim to guide our children to reach their potential and contribute something to the world. "We can't really change the nature of our children," Kelly writes on page 257, "but we can steer them to tasks and duties that match their talents." Likewise, he suggests, we can guide and steer technology.

Was The Unibomber Right?

Kelly spends a significant part of the book exploring the moral and ethical issues around an ever more powerful technium. Is it wise for humanity to continue to let technologies evolve, until the technium is more intelligent than humanity?

A whole chapter is devoted to the theories of the infamous Unibomber, Ted Kaczynski. Kaczynski wrote a manifesto about destroying modern technology before it destroys us. He killed 3 people with mail bombs, while attempting to carry out his manifesto. Kelly at first defends Kaczynski's theories, but he ends the chapter by attacking him on a moral level. Kelly writes (page 212-213):

"But despite the reality of technology's faults, the Unibomber is wrong to want to exterminate it, for many reasons, not the least of which is that the machine of civilization offers us more actual freedoms than the alternative [...] so far the gains from this ever-enlarging technium outweigh the alternative of no machine at all."

The Optimistic View of Technology

Ultimately 'What technology Wants' is an uplifting and optimistic book about the future of technology. It contrasts in many ways to another thought-provoking technology book, which I read and reviewed a year ago: You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto; by Jaron Lanier. In that book, Lanier argued that technology reduces our humanity - for example by promoting the 'hive mind' over individual expression. Interestingly, Lanier is quoted on the jacket of Kelly's book. He recommends you read this book, "even though I profoundly disagree with aspects of it."

It's always beneficial to have skeptics about technology, so there's a place for Lanier's arguments. Both of Lanier's and Kelly's books are stimulating and well worth reading. However, I find myself much more swayed by Kelly's theories. Whereas Lanier dismisses the Internet as meaningless in and of itself, Kelly essentially argues that the technium (of which the Internet is a part) is a hugely important evolving system. It's as much a living system as humanity is. That, I suspect, is one of the aspects that Lanier would disagree with. But I find Kelly's theory to be compelling - and helpful as an approach to the increasing power of technology.

The book concludes that technology is ultimately good for humanity. Admittedly that was Kelly's pre-destined outcome - back in November, 2004, when he began writing the book, he blogged: "I sense that overall, technology is a good thing." However the end result of his 7 year quest, the book, compellingly makes that case. I think this line near the end of the book sums it up beautifully:

"How can technology make a person better? Only in this way: by providing each person with chances."

(which incidentally echoes my own thoughts after I read Lanier's book: "[...] Lanier glosses over the benefits of web 2.0 - that it gives everyone who has a computer (and nowadays a smart phone) a publishing platform with which to explore their creativity and have their say.")

I gave Kelly's book 5 out of 5 stars on Goodreads, because ultimately it provides useful advice on how to think about and deal with technology. Perhaps aspects of the book can be challenged on scientific or philosophical terms, as some have argued. But that seems beside the point. I think we'd all agree that technology is evolving incredibly fast. We need to try and understand the changes. We need strategies to get the best out of technology (and, by extension, ourselves). That's what Kevin Kelly wants; and in my view the book achieves it.

Photo credit: Doc Searls

Lanier's main issue with web 2.0 is that, in his view, it promotes the 'hive mind' over individual expression. He writes that web 2.0 presents the current generation of kids with a "reduced expectation of what a person can be."

Lanier is of course just the latest in a long line of web 2.0 cynics. They range in quality from the sharp critiques of Nicholas Carr, to the sensationalistic rantings of Andrew Keen. Lanier is thankfully more akin to Carr, in that he's thought provoking and brings something new to the table.

Lanier's theories are intriguing and in some cases very compelling. However, ultimately I found his "manifesto" to be fragmentary and lacking a definitive conclusion. I was not entirely convinced by the end of the book - which is a problem, because a manifesto should ideally provoke further action from its readers.

Wikipedia: Mob Rule

Wikipedia comes in for the most criticism in the book, because the online encyclopedia is written by an army of mostly anonymous people. Therefore, Lanier claims, Wikipedia stifles individual expression. According to Lanier, Wikipedia is "intellectual mob rule" and "seeks to erase point of view entirely." He goes so far as to call the individual voice "the opposite of wikiness."

Although this is an extreme view of Wikipedia, and wikis in general, I did find one point to be particularly compelling: Wikipedia dominates search results and for that reason it is suppressing individual voices. As Lanier put it, "Wikipedia provides search engines with a way to be lazy" - by putting Wikipedia results at or near the top of search results for millions of topics.

Facebook: Multiple-Choice Identities

Other Web 2.0 stalwarts don't escape Lanier's withering gaze.

Facebook is criticized for encouraging people to create "standardized presences," due to its black and white categorizations of people. Later in the book Lanier writes that Facebook organizes people into "multiple-choice identities."

Blogs are also criticized, for their "standardized designs" that encourage "pseudonymity" in features like blog comments. Lanier doesn't highlight though that the rise of blogs and other social media websites have given a voice to hundreds of thousands of people, who were previously excluded from the mainstream media landscape because they didn't have access to an adequate publishing platform.

Lanier: Elitist?

This is where I found myself most in disagreement with Lanier. Here is a highly intelligent and successful software architect, who hangs out with scientists and Internet intellectuals. Is it any wonder then that he is so gung-ho on individual expression? The people he associates with on a daily basis are the intellectual elite!

In my opinion Lanier is a bit too quick to dismiss the content of blogs and Twitter, simply because the design of those publishing platforms are "standardized." The design may well be standardized, but many people have created original and compelling content using these web 2.0 platforms. Even Lanier recognizes that if you look past the first layer of Wikipedia results in Google, you'll often find compelling individual voices.

The Network By Itself is Meaningless

Lanier's argument that web 2.0 designs "actively demand that people define themselves downward" is a compelling one. I agree that Wikipedia and Facebook both have significant flaws and that both are indeed contributing to a middling, less creative culture. In particular I am sympathetic to the notion that individual expression is suffering - every time I see an anonymous comment on ReadWriteWeb that is critical of something, I wince and immediately place less value on it than if the comment had a real name attached to it.

So, Lanier's concerns about the 'hive mind' and loss of individual expression are valid. He puts it rather poetically here:

"The central mistake of recent digital culture is to chop up a network of individuals so finely that you end up with a mush. You then start to care about the abstraction of the network more than the real people who are networked, even though the network by itself is meaningless. Only the people were ever meaningful."

Beyond The Flaws of Web 2.0

However, I also think that Lanier glosses over the benefits of web 2.0 - that it gives everyone who has a computer (and nowadays a smart phone) a publishing platform with which to explore their creativity and have their say.

Regardless of what you think of the resulting content - whether it's largely unoriginal, or the best of it gets lost in noise, or aggregators make "mush" of it - the fact that web 2.0 has democratized the publishing industry is something that should continue to be celebrated. Lanier's book tends to dismiss this blossoming of new media as simply the product of web 2.0 "standardized designs" - and that comes across as elitist and pompous.

Overall, You Are Not a Gadget is a thought provoking and compelling book. If, like me, you find yourself iPad-less this weekend, then I'd encourage you to spend some time consuming this book.

In Siegel's latest book, Pull, he tackles the Semantic Web. Once again, Siegel plays loosely with existing web standards.

Pull is being positioned as a business guide to the emerging Semantic Web. It has similarities to Creating Killer Web Sites, which caught the wave of an emerging big trend of the mid-90s (web site design) and became a bestseller. Siegel is attempting to catch a second big online wave, with the Semantic Web in 2010.

Siegel explains the title in the introduction:

"This book describes the pull era, where customers pull everything to them on demand - products, services, information, knowledge, and advice. Much of the foundation for pulling is called the semantic web, a new way of packaging information to make it much more useful and reusable. Over the next ten to twenty years, it will change business from a lead-push model to a pull-follow model of interacting with customers."

It's hard to argue against the vision that the book outlines. However for many Semantic Web proponents, the foundational technologies are Resource Description Framework (RDF), Web Ontology Language (OWL), and Extensible Markup Language (XML). These standards allow web publishers to encode meaning - semantics - into their sites.

David Siegel's definition of Semantic Web is far broader. On the book's accompanying website, The Power of Pull, there is a "Semantic Web Acid Test." It defines a semantic web business as one that has an "unambiguous" structure for its data. The book states that "some technologists feel that semantic web data must be expressed using a language called RDF," but Siegel disagrees. Instead, he believes that "simple, unambiguous formats are part of the semantic web."

The book is ultimately about how structured data will change how we do business. Frankly, the use of the term 'Semantic Web' in this book feels forced. Even so, I think it's a very useful book and offers detailed scenarios of how structured data will improve business. For example, chapter 4 is about retailers and outlines the benefits of RFID tags in retail - including describing a visit Siegel made to forward-thinking German retailer Metro Group.

Overall Pull is a solid and well-researched book. It's a good introduction for business people to structured data and the Semantic Web.

My one issue with the book is that Siegel's appropriation of the term 'Semantic Web' leaves me feeling a little uneasy. On the home page of his personal website is a blog post (entitled 'Why I Should be Apple's Next CEO'), in which Siegel claims that he "started talking about the Semantic Web in 1998, before Tim Berners-Lee coined the term." Whether that's true or not, it does beg the question: is Siegel's definition of the Semantic Web the same as Tim Berners-Lee's?

Disclosure: David Siegel posted me a copy of his new book.

Said Hewlett-Packard's Andrew Bolwell in a recent ABC World News feature on the book,"We think a book like this that's printed only after it's ordered, that's personalized for the end user, is absolutely the future of publishing. You can have your own family cookbook with Grandma's recipe through to Martha Stewart's recipe."

It appears that unbeknown to Bolwell, the future (much like President Obama) has already arrived. RWW has already covered a number of companies where products are produced on an individual basis and personalized to the user. Below is a list of companies that allow users to upload, price and purchase their personalized books:

1. Blurb: Blurb offers users the chance to personalize books in a variety of formats. The quality of this product is extremely striking and buyers can opt for a number of page layouts and finishes. The company is one of the few businesses able to earn healthy revenue in our down economy.

2. Lulu: Similar to Blurb, Lulu also allows customers to personalize and create books. Users can upload photos from their Facebook, Flickr and Photobucket accounts as well as directly from their computers. The finished products are sold in the Lulu online storefront as eBooks or physical hard covers. The company even offers square, compact and wallet sized options.

3. CreateSpace: In late 2007, Amazon launched CreateSpace as an on-demand book publishing service. In addition to being able to create a personalized book and sell it in the Amazon storefront, users can also create Kindle-specific books, audio CDs, MP3s, DVD's and video downloads. While the service isn't as sleek as Lulu or Blurb, the potential to reach the Amazon audience is a huge draw to those looking to earn money with their creative talents.

4. Scribd: Another site with a large audience, Scribd recently launched their own store this past April. With 60 million unique visitors per month, the company is a great platform for those looking to publish their original works. Budding authors can price and publish their books alongside Simon and Schuster titles in the Scribd storefront. For now, the storefront only services the eBook audience.

5. Tastebook: Both Grandma and Martha Stewart's recipes can live side-by-side in this personalized cookbook making site. Featured in a RWW article on recipe resources, this tool offers users the chance to personalize cookbooks and produce them on an individual basis.

The Obama Time Capsule is obviously a very cool project, but it's clear to see that personalized book production is certainly not a new concept. That being said, regardless of whether or not it's a paradigm shifter for publishing, the quality of The Obama Time Capsule, coupled with Smolan's recognition as a TIME photographer and TED speaker will likely still draw fans.

UPDATE: It turns out Obama's Time Capsule IS actually made possible by Blurb's global print partner network, a partnership which exclusively uses the HP Indigo digital printing presses. Other partners include Google, Facebook, AOL, Glam Media and paper manufacturer NewPage.

While there are inborn traits that help to develop character, often character comes from inspiration. Ask any enterprenuer about who set the bar for them and you will hear the name of another enterprenuer, a historical figure, a writer, even a fictional character. So in this post, we look at five very different books that share a common theme - remarkable people.

1. Inside Steve's Brain, by Leander Kahney

There's probably no one in the tech industry who doesn't know or admire Steve Jobs. Tireless innovator and one of the fathers of computer technology, Steve has had a hand in many modern marvels. His first famous 'child' was Macintosh, and the latest is iPhone. Steve also revolutionized the music industry by taking music online, and helped push computer animation by funding Pixar.

How has he done it? By being relentless, passionate and focused. Steve in the early days was reputed to be impossible to work with. Yet, he is widely admired and recognized as a great leader. The bottom line is that Steve gets the job done.

Kahney's book, which Richard recently reviewed here, is a compact edition that gives insight into Steve's character. You will learn how Steve utilizes creativity, focus, and at times the stick, to drive Apple's team to build amazing products.

2. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, by Haruki Murakami

Haruki Murakami is one of the best modern Japanese writers. His books are creative and unique, his writing is an inspiration. Murakami, not only a gifted writer, is also a remarkable character. In this book he describes his journey as a runner. At age 30 he quit smoking and started running.

Training tirelessly he readied himself for his first marathon. He flew to Athens and, retracing the original route, ran to the town of Marathon.

Since then, Murakami has competed in at least one marathon and triathlon a year. He trains with the same discipline with which he iterates to perfect his writing. This short book reveals simple yet powerful truths. Reading these pages, Murakami emerges as an incredible force of focus and will.

To learn more, read our companion post: What Startups Can Learn From Haruki Murakami.

3. It's Not About the Bike, by Lance Armstrong

Lance Armstrong is one of the most impressive athletes in modern sport. The stamina and character needed to win the Tour De France are impressive, but Lance's most impressive race was not on the bike. Shortly after winning his first world championship at age 25 Lance confronted testicular cancer. He fought it for a year and won. This book focuses on this fight and connects the dots in his life.

Written in a simple yet profound way, the book inspires on every page. Armstrong reveals that cancer made him a different, better person. It reshaped his character from boyish, feisty, more physical rider to a wiser, patient and more tactical cyclist. Ultimately he argues that if it wasn't for cancer he could never have become great.

The book relates an inspiring journey, the crux of which is: never quit and never back down.

4. The Maverick and His Machine, by Kevin Maney

Today IBM might not be the most inspirational company around, but its story is full of innovation and character. IBM owes its status to the pair of Thomas J. Watson, Snr and Jnr, two different men passionate about business and computing. The book is a biography of IBM from its inception as CTR (Computing Tabulating Recording) Company to the defining player in modern computing.

Watson Snr's style was a mix of carrot and stick. He demanded a lot from employees and focused on corporate culture. He planted roots of growth and scale that were leveraged by his son, Thomas J. Watson Jnr, who succeeded his father as CEO. Watson Jnr took the company to the next level, pushing it into the mainframe business.

The father and son blend in a single narrative and what emerges is IBM's character of strength, passion, focus and success. Even though the skills that created IBM differ from those needed to build a successful startup, the book is a great read for every enterprenuer.

5. The Pixar Touch, by David Pierce

All five books on our list are full of strong characters, but the Pixar team had to endure plenty to realise their computer animation dream. For two decades the team had to work odd tangential jobs to stay alive. Remarkably the group stayed together and survived thanks to Steve Jobs, who bought Pixar for $5M from Lucas Digital and (reluctantly) kept the company going through the years until its triumphant launch of Toy Story and the later multi-billion dollar exit to Disney.

What help the Pixar team win was an obsession to make computer animation happen. Even while Disney and Lucas Digital were dismissing the promise of making movies using computer graphics, the team stuck together. They continued to build and enhance their software and algorithms, ultimately leading to a set of solutions that enabled hits like Toy Story, Finding Nemo and The Incredibles. The Pixar story is an inspirational lesson on how enterpreneurs can succeed in business and life.

And now tell us about people and books that have inspired you and helped build your character.

Top image: Daniel Y. Go

One of the great discoveries of modern science was the realization of how interconnected the world is. The deterministic, Newtonian view of a clockwork Universe was replaced by the much more dynamic, uncertain and entangled world of Quantum Mechanics. The new world is the one where Godel forever cut hopes for completeness in mathematics and Turing showed that computation, like the future, is fundamentally unpredictable. Despite these unexpected setbacks, modern science is wonderful, powerful and thought provoking - and relevant to technologists.

1. Godel, Escher, Bach, by Douglas Hofstadter

This Pulitzer Prize winning book is a mind-opening journey that spans science, computation, zen, art, music and much much more. The book is most unusual in the way it tells its story. Some chapters are dialogs between Achilles and Tortoise. Other chapters are focused on Bach's fugues and the theorems of great German mathematician Kurt Gordel.

Throughout the book, Hofstadter discusses the work of M.C. Escher, a painter famous for his paradoxical paintings that question how the mind perceives space. In addition, the book features chapters about modern genetics, zen buddhism and neuroscience. All of these seemingly diverse topics come together to discuss recursive structures, the mind, artificial intelligence and computation.

2. Complexity by Mitchell Waldrop

Stephen Hawking once said: "I think the next century will be the century of complexity." Complexity science is one of the most important breakthroughs in recent history. Unlike the traditional specialized approach to science, complexity focuses on patterns and properties that exist across different branches.

Mitchell Waldrop's book introduces readers to complexity by telling a story about the people who brought it into the spotlight. Among the characters we meet are economists, physicists, biologists and computer scientists responsible for establishing the Institute of Complex Systems in Santa Fe New Mexico. Through their stories, Walldrop introduces the reader to the wonderful and profound world of complex systems.

3. At Home in the Universe, by Stuart Kauffman

Dr. Stuart Kauffman is one of the characters in the Walldrop's book. He is one of the most passionate, dedicated and original thinkers about Complex Systems. A few decades ago, while in medical school, he wanted to understand gene networks and came up with a model known as K-N nets. Fascinated with the ideas, he choose science instead of medicine and went on to work on complexity.

In this book he explores a range of fascinating topics - like gene networks, auto-catalytic sets, rugged landscapes. It ultimately leads to the question of the origin of life. In this challenging book, Kauffman postulates that life is not an accident, but an expected and even inevitable consequence of the laws of self-organization.

4. The User Illusion, by Tor Norretranders

During the twentieth century scientists made amazing discoveries about the brain. They also discovered just how little we know about the function of what is likely to be the most interesting and powerful object in the universe. Among the large number of books written on the subject, this book written by Danish journalist Tor Norretranders is a standout.

The books builds on physics, particularly thermodynamics, to explain the fascinating aspects of human consciousness. While the first few chapters are somewhat challenging, the crux of the book will give you a unique, eye-opening perspective on the interplay between the human brain and mind. Among the shocking things in the book is a notion that it takes a half a second for our consciousness to process an event. Knowing that, it is difficult to think about the world in the same way.

5. Programming the Universe, by Seth Lloyd

Quantum Information Theory is one of the hottest topics in science and Seth Lloyd is one of the hottest figures in the field. Famous for his bold predictions about the computational capacity of the universe, Dr. Lloyd belongs to the club that thinks that we live inside of a gigantic quantum computer. Sounds interesting? It is!

The book works the readers through the ideas of quantum information theory, explaining qbits, quantum superpositions and computation based on atoms. He argues that random fluctuations in the quantum foam produced higher-density areas, then matter, stars, galaxies and life. His conclusion is the same as Kauffman's - life is not an accident nor its divine. Rather, life is a consequence of the laws of computation and self-organization.

Conclusion

There are so many great science books on topics ranging from physics and biology to economics and social science. These books discuss patterns in the world around us. And many of the themes are very familiar to us, technologists. This is why it is important for us to keep up and know what is going on in the world of science. Besides being fascinating, it is increasingly applicable and useful.

And now, please share with us your favorite science books - the ones that made a big impact on you and helped expand your mind.

Find Your Passion and Commit to it

Murakami was a late bloomer, writing his first work at age 29. One day while watching baseball he realized his destiny was to be a writer. At the time he owned a jazz bar, yet the experience at the baseball game had a lasting effect. He started to write and over the next few years his life changed.

Whether you're a blogger or software engineer, you've experienced the same feeling: a blog post that has to be written; a piece of code that needs to exist. These moments of clarity are precious and we should follow them whenever possible.

Murakami faced a choice between his business and a career as a writer. Though the future was uncertain, he made a commitment to writing and sold his jazz bar. Soon after focusing on writing full-time, he realized his fiction suffered because he was out of shape. Murakami quit smoking and started running. Today he is a marathon man and runs every day.

Each startup always faces choices. Making a commitment, focusing, and then giving it your all, is the key. There are always obstacles, but if you know what you're after you can overcome them.

Stick With What You Know

I'd read Murakami novels before his autobigraphical piece. Now I realize how much of him is in his novels. His books frequently talk about jazz and one novel, South of the Border, West of the Sun, is about an owner of a jazz bar. Murakami loves cats and uses them to create unique, mesmerizing imagery. Most of all, Murakami writes about love, passion and loneliness.

A few years back, I decided to make a real estate investment in Florida. Excited, I did a lot of research and was talking about it to my father-in-law, an experienced businessman. His advice: stick with what you know. While initially disappointed, I then realized he was right. I am a software engineer and a tech entrepreneur. I should be betting on my startup instead.

Many individuals and companies make the mistake of jumping into areas they know little about. A few succeed, but most never make it. It is better to start a company around the topic you're an expert in or know a lot about. This will give you an edge and ensure you're not wasting your time.

Start Even and Finish First

Murakami's life is a routine. He rises early around 5am and goes to bed by 10pm. He declines late-night dinners and outings. He runs and works on his books daily. He achieves his magic by pushing equally every day.

When Brad Feld, an early stage technology VC and a marathon runner, recently completed his 11th marathon, he re-learnt this lesson during the run. In the recap on his blog he wrote:

I started strong. Too strong. Rule #1 of the marathon is to hold plenty back at the beginning so you have it left at the end. I went through the halfway point (13.1m) at 2:20, on track for a sub 4:45. I tightened up at mile 15 and slowed a notch, thinking I still had a shot at sub 5:00. At mile 19 I went down another notch and was now slogging through 13-minute miles. At this point I knew I wouldn't break 5:00 and my goal shifted from "break 5 hours" to "finish this thing".

The first time I realized this lesson was watching Cathy Freeman win gold in the 2000 Sydney Olympics. She won by running like a robot, with uniform speed through the entire course.

Startups are intense. Run too fast and you'll burn out. Many young entrepreneurs think startups are like sprints, when you just race from the start to the finish line. In fact, startups are more like marathons, so pace yourself.

Never Settle and Always Seek Creativity

Perhaps the most striking thing about Murakami is his creativity. My favorite Murakami book is Wind-up Bird Chronicle, a mesmerising "experiential" piece of fiction. As you read you experience a world of mystical images, ideas and characters.

Each Murakami novel is different. The author never settles, constantly seeking new ways to express himself. Remarkably, he says writing is not easy for him. Such creative work is carefully crafted. It seems like an outcome of pure passion, but it is not. The author seeks to break the methods he created yesterday and move on towards unexplored territory.

Passion and creativity are the two most important factors for a startup. Without these key ingredients, there is no success. But just like the artist needs to reinvent himself, so also do startups. It won't be the original wave of creativity that will carry you through, instead it will be the quest and the will to never settle that will make your dreams come true.

Conclusion

The beads of sweat drip off my face as I run up the hill. It is a mild summer Sunday in New Jersey and I enjoy my regular running route. With each step, the pieces of this post crystallize in my head. I know I have to write it, because Murakami can make a difference in your startup life too. Steadily as I climb I think about this man, his will and his magical fiction.

My iPod starts playing a faster beat, but I do not speed up. I've done this many times on this course to my dismay, so now I know better. I treat this course like a startup. It is a mini marathon where I run evenly and ponder these cool and creative things in my head.

And now please tell us what writer you find inspirational and helpful in your startup life.

This book has a lot of business lessons in it for budding startup entrepreneurs, so for that reason alone I recommend it to our readers. For example when Steve Jobs returned as Apple CEO in the 90's, one of the first things he did was cut down the number of products Apple had - from around 40, to just 4. The book describes how Jobs went about simplifying Apple's brand and focusing in on the key products that consumers wanted. This is something a lot of startups and media companies would do well to emulate.

Also compelling are the stories behind the phenomenal success of the candy-colored iMacs, the iPod, the Apple Store, and other Apple products of this era. I'd read much of this before in media articles and the like, but Kahney does a great job of bringing all those stories together in one book, while adding new quotes and commentary from key Apple staff members. For example on the Apple Store:

"We said, we want our stores to create an ownership experience for the customer," explained (Apple's Ron) Johnson. The store should be about the lifetime of the product, not the moment of the transaction.

Leander Kahney obviously knows his stuff when it comes to Apple. He is a news editor for Wired.com and the main author of the Cult of Mac blog. He previously wrote two other Apple books, The Cult of Mac and The Cult of iPod. I may have browsed through one or both of those books before, but Inside Steve's Brain is a more memorable look at the person behind much of Apple's success today. I highly recommend it, even if you're not an Apple user.

On that note, here's my story about my Mac conversion...

I didn't become a passionate Machead until the last couple of years. I had used Apple products in the 80's and 90's (my primary computer in my Uni years in the early 90's was a Macintosh). But I have always been a bit wary about Apple's hip factor and the cult-like behavior of its more rabid fans. And yes, I am one of those people who finds 'The Mac Guy' in the current TV ads just a little too smug (I feel a bit sorry for Windows Guy, who is actually far more like the typical nerds that I know and love). However I've came around to being a Mac Guy. I currently use a Macbook as my main computer, and I am going to buy an iMac next; I have a couple of iPods, I use iTunes, I visit Apple Stores whenever I'm in America, and of course I am a huge fan and fervent user of the iPhone. I will probably even buy an Apple TV in the near future - and then the Digital Lifestyle will be almost exclusively Apple for me!

It's hard to ignore Apple products when they are so beautifully designed, simple to use, ground-breaking (e.g. iPhone), highly functional, and (yes) hip! If you want to know the reasons behind all that, this book provides excellent insights.

Are you an Apple user? If so what's your story?

The first quote comes from page 18, where Bob was outlining his early days as a young and then unknown folk singer in New York City. He wrote:

The second bit of Dylan's autobiography that caught my eye was the following, referring to an encounter with a famous wrestler called Gorgeous George. George was just entering the ring for a bout and, as Dylan recalls:

That's how I feel about my blogging, as it relates to my career and indeed most of the people I know in the Real World. So far the only "recognition" I've gotten for what I'm doing is from fellow bloggers. I imagine that's a similar story to a lot of you though, seeing as blogging is still very much a niche activity.

When it comes down to it, I write on my weblog mostly for the "thing's sake" and because I know I'm onto something. The only exception is when I'm being paid to write a blog post mentioning my sponsor - which I have to admit is motivated purely by the money. My strategy for that is: for each paid post (which is once a week and it's clearly marked as being sponsored) I try to write about the things that matter to me, and get that to intersect with the thing I'm being paid for.

I'm trying to have my cake and eat it too - I still write for "the thing's sake" (or at least I'm telling myself I am), but I try to find the intersection point with my sponsor's product. My latest such post, Grunge CMS, was an attempt at that. Not sure yet if it's working out that way. If you have any thoughts on that, from a reader's perspective, I'd like to hear them.

So back to Bob Dylan's autobiography, which was a wonderful read. He didn't take a purely chronological approach to it, despite the title! He started out with the early New York pre-fame days and then suddenly segued into the mid-to-late 70's when he was trying to escape his fame and live a normal family life. One of the themes I most enjoyed was his refusal to accept the role of Spokesman for his Generation. He'd developed tactics and strategies to try and get rid of that unwanted tag, which mostly amounted to strange behavior and quirky recordings (such as one of my favourite Dylan records, Nashville Skyline). I wonder what would have happened if Kurt Cobain - another musician anointed as a Spokesman for his Generation - had adopted the same tactics, instead of killing himself? We'll never know and I'm making a lot of presumptions even asking that question.

btw I'm also currently on a Dylan kick with his music. I've borrowed a number of his old records from the library and I'm really enjoying Blood on the Tracks. I'm playing it over and over. Music, for the thing's sake.

I haven't read all of Coupland's work, but I had a go at both of the novels that preceded Hey Nostradamus! - All Families Are Psychotic (2001) and Miss Wyoming (1999). I have to say that both were very disappointing and I finished neither. I don't think I even got past the first few chapters. I just couldn't connect with those books. The characters were not very likeable and there seemed to be a lack of soul in the worlds presented - although I recognize this was deliberate on Coupland's part. Don't get me wrong - the writing itself is top drawer, as you'd expect. But the characters and settings of those two books were deliberately superficial. Unfortunately that made the books hard to connect with and so I wasn't compelled to finish them.

Finally I get to the review of Nostradamus!

So we come to 2003's Hey Nostradamus!. Let me say right here and now that this book ranks up with Microserfs and Girlfriend in a Coma, possibly surpassing them. The book is in 4 parts and each part is narrated, in the first person, by a different character. Not only that, but the 4 parts span 15 years, from 1988 to 2003. Coupland successfully gets inside the skin of each of the 4 narrators. Each narrator is very different from the others, but they also have shared experiences on a personal and humanistic sense that helps to bring the book together into a unified whole. 

The story starts with a Columbine-like school massacre, where 3 disaffected youths go on a shooting rampage in a school cafeteria. One of the victims is a 17-year old girl named Cheryl, who is the narrator of part 1 (from the after-life!). Cheryl was a sweet-tempered but otherwise ordinary girl who secretly got married to her school sweetheart Jason just weeks before the shooting. In fact, that was the most exciting aspect of her life to date - a life fatefully cut short. Just before she was shot, Cheryl had scribbled into her binder: "GOD IS NOWHERE/GOD IS NOW HERE". Those words would later immortalise her memory, along with her cherubic yearbook photo. But at the time she wrote them: "...all I was doing was trying to clear out my head and think of nothing, to generate enough silence to make time stand still".

The next section is narrated by Jason, Cheryl's high school sweetheart. Jason wasn't present in the cafeteria at the time of the tragedy, however he arrived just as it was nearing its conclusion and he managed to kill one of the gunmen - but too late to save Cheryl. It's 11 years later when he writes his narrative. Incidentally Coupland is at pains to make sure each character physically writes down their narrative - in Jason's case on pink bank note slips. At first I found this to be a rather hokey novelistic device. But on reflection, I believe it did add to the authenticity of each narrative - each character was in a sense purging themself of their story and making it immortal, by writing it down. 

But back to Jason's narrative - it's 11 years after Cheryl's tragic murder and Jason has struggled to accept it and get on with his life. He is a bachelor who lives a rather squalid life filled with part-time jobs, booze, and some hazy dealings with seedy gangsters. The most significant part of Jason's narrative is his description of his relationship with his father, a very strict religious man with a seemingly heartless lack of tact. I thought there were some plot twists in Jason's narrative that struggled to keep my disbelief suspended, but it was how those plot devices provided depth of meaning to the characters that held it all together. 

The third part is narrated by Heather, who meets Jason and becomes his partner. They share an imaginary world together, filled with make-believe creatures and childlike stories. Heather is a courtroom transcriber and much of her narrative is written while she is at work - instead of transcribing a boring courtroom trial, she writes about her experiences with Jason! I better not ruin the plot, but I will say that Heather ends up being just as sympathetic a character as Jason and for similar reasons.

The fourth and final narrative is from Reg, Jason's father. Reg was portrayed as a narrow-minded and heartless man by Jason and this is well supported by anecdotes of the things Reg did in the name of orthodox religion - for example, immediately after the school shootings in 1988 he didn't support Jason but instead morally condemned him for killing one of the gunmen in the cafeteria. In his narrative, written in 2003, Reg has softened his strict religious stance by this stage and is somewhat contrite for the way he treated people in the past. His section is short, but concludes the book with a note of redemption.

Summary

It's hard to adequately convey the depth of feeling present in this book - you have to read it yourself to experience it. All I can say is that the book held me spellbound during the time I read it. For example when I was reading it on the train, I sometimes got a bit misty-eyed and occasionally I paused to stare out of the train window with a soulful expression on my face. I probably looked like a right berk. 

This is a superb effort by Douglas Coupland and ranks with his very best work.

My rating: 9/10

First impressions. Short book, more of a novella than a novel. I finished it in one day (a day off work). Alex Garland, if you don't know his work, wrote a famous novel called The Beach in the 90's. The book was much better than the Leonardo Di Caprio movie of the same name. Garland's second novel was called The Tesseract and was set in the Philippines. So this is Garland's third novel (although as I said, it's more of a novella).

Without spoiling the plot, the bulk of the book describes a dream world. It's a rather tired theme in literature and indeed cinema - the blur between reality and dreams. And to be frank, I thought the middle section of the book was weak. The dream world was never very convincing to me. But the start and end of the book saved it. This seems to mirror the main themes of the book: waking/dreaming, birth/death, reality/dreams, start/end.

So the novella format Garland adopts is I think deliberate. He wants us to finish the book in a day, or read it all in one sitting even. So that it's similar to the timespan of a dream, which typically occurs during a period of sleep.

To the plot. Basically the main character (it's a first-person narrative) gets beaten up in a train and falls into a coma. The dream world described in the book is a result of the coma. That's about all there is to the plot. But Garland wraps it up very well and the ending circles back onto the beginning, in line with the themes mentioned above.

Well those are my first impressions of this book. I may read it again to get a better handle on it.

My Rating: 6/10