Archive for the ‘books’ Category
Via Boing Boing:
Each new book published is counted only once on this map, regardless of how many copies it sells… A book is defined as having at least 50 pages; a pamphlet has 5 to 49 pages. Publications with fewer than 5 pages are not shown on this map. Worldwide, about a million new book titles were published in 1999, with the largest numbers published in the United Kingdom, China and Germany. Overall, the map is dominated by Western Europe, which is home to a number of well established publishing houses
I must have this book. There are more sample maps from The Atlas of the Real World at this page.
Since my roommate is spending his evening occupied with unselfconscious creativity, I figure I can do a little better than dredging up interesting photos from flickr. As alluded to in my 4th of July musings, I just finished Interpreter of Maladies, the Pulitzer-winning collection of short stories by Jhumpa Lahiri, which I bought on a whim to console myself after my latest bicycle-buying misadventure. The stories are excellent (as you might imagine, given, you know, the Pulitzer and everything) in their own right, but I think I enjoyed them, in large part, because they nearly all revolve around things, my relationships with which I’ve recently been reconsidering: India, New England, and academia. Similar themes dominate Lahiri’s The Namesake (on a superficial level, at least), which I grabbed on a whim as I was walking out the door on my way to Indiana, secretly a little distraught to be leaving home again so soon after arriving. Even though my own experience is obviously, radically different from those of the characters in the stories, most recently arrived from India, outsiders trying to make lives for themselves in the place I was born and raised in, I can’t help but think that the difference is, in someways, not of kind but of degree.
Coming back from my time abroad, a rather unexpected digression from my planned academic trajectory, has somewhat predictably led (warning! cliches ahead!) to changes in perspective, and in a way I might even say that because of these as-of-yet-unexamined shifts the place (or places: Williams, New England, America) I’ve come back to is not the one that I left. I suppose this is the “reverse culture shock” that we were warned about, warnings I mostly ignored, since I didn’t think that I suffered from terribly bad non-reverse culture shock to begin with. Maybe I’m just being melodramatic, what with all the reading and coffee drinking and cooking and introspecting I’ve had time to do lately, or maybe I’m just indulging a burgeoning nostalgia for my time spent in India with a close group of friends, and mistaking that for nostalgia for India itself, but right now I’m inclined to think that my interest in and attachment to those places and people and culture and history is meaningful and lasting. And that, combined with missing New England and lots and lots of confusion about what my likely career in academia really means, makes Lahiri’s stories absolutely captivating.
It also can’t hurt that I’ve been absolutely starved for good fiction recently. Recently as in the last few months. At this point I will eagerly solicit suggestions for summer reading, be it fiction or non-fiction, edifying or merely entertaining.
I’ve been slowly coming to a realization over the last few days, brought about by lots of time to sit around and think and read blogs and some books and think some more. What I’m realizing is how exhausted I am by how politicized everything in Dharamsala is. Everything either relates or is made to relate somehow to the Tibet Question, in a political sense. I suppose I might have realized earlier that this is an issue for me, since every single one of my papers for culture class has focused pretty heavily on these issues of politicization, whether it’s of identity or art or what.
In a sense, the converse of this frustration is that I miss good, dispassionate scholarship on things that are happily and firmly held at arm’s length in time or space or discourse. But, then again, this isn’t the point of what I and we are doing here, and in large part the reason I wanted to do this and come here is to step out of my comfort zone, the zone of reading about things in books and thinking from my cozy academic armchair nestled safely away in Williamstown.
This place is far from safe. Not only in the physical sense or even the cultural sense, but in the academic, intellectual sense as well. There is a very very fine line—or rather, a very complicated relationship—between propaganda and posturing and real, useful information here. So much of what is said and, more generally, performed here is for something: the preservation of Tibet’s “unique cultural heritage” or the vilification of the Chinese government or the presentation of Tibetans as essentially peaceful, Buddhist people who intrinsically care for women’s rights and the environment.
None of this, of course, can be taken at face value, and it’s frankly quite tiring to always have to worry about who’s saying what for what reasons while simultaneously dealing with the force of their deeply emotional convictions. That makes me uncomfortable; I’ve always been the kid that goes to his room and shuts the door whenever there’s any sort of tension in the house. I hope that it’s understandable if I then find refreshing the sort of dispassionate scholasticism of organizations like Amnye Machen or books like Geoffrey Samuel’s Civilized Shamans. I grabbed this book from the library on a whim, remembering that we read part of it in Dreyfus’s class, and it was partly my surprise at discovering just how this semester of Tibetan studies has been from that one that caused all these thoughts to crystallize.
The last thing that I’ll mention here is another thing that helped prompt these thoughts. Slate today had a piece that discusses “the deep contradictions of Christian popular culture” that strongly reminded me of some of the problems faced by exile Tibetans (especially in Dharamsala) in creating meaningful popular Tibetan culture.
The Christian rockers Radosh interviews are always torn between the pressure not to lead their young audience astray and the drive to make good music. Mark Allan Powell, a professor who teaches a class on contemporary Christian music at Trinity Lutheran Seminary, describes the predicament for Radosh: Imagine the Good Rubber Tire Co. came out with an awesome rock song that just happened to be about tires. Musicians wouldn’t want to play it because they’d think, “We’re being used,” Powell explains. Creative Christian types find themselves in a similar bind: They want to make good, authentic music. But they are also enlisted in a specific mission which confines their art.
There are obvious differences between exiled Tibetans and American evangelical Christians, but both groups face the challenge of retaining a distinct cultural identity while living in an inescapable, hegemonic culture. And what happens to the identity, and to the performance or enactment of that identity, is in important ways the same: it becomes heavily, explicitly politicized, to the extent that the agency of individuals is severely constrained.
Now, whether or not that agency is necessary or even good or beneficial is another question, one that I haven’t really thought about too much…
Via Boing Boing comes word of Making Things Talk: Practical Methods for Connecting Physical Objects, a book chock full of information about how to connect just about anything to just about anything else using all sorts of electronics wizardry. Best of all, it’s written for “people with little technical training but a lot of interest!” Some examples of stuff you might do:
- Make your pet’s bed send you email
- Make your own seesaw game controller that communicates over the Internet
- Learn how to use ZigBee and Bluetooth radios to transmit sensor data wirelessly
- Set up communication between microcontrollers, personal computers, and web servers using three easy-to-program, open source environments: Arduino/Wiring, Processing, and PHP.
- Write programs to send data across the Internet based on physical activity in your home, office, or backyard
Sqwee!
Yesterday I read C.S. Lewis’s The Case for Christianity and, surprisingly, found the gettin-saved parts far more compelling than his philosophical argument for the existence of a god. In large part, I think that this is due to the unflappable zeal with which he conjures up dichotomies, simplifies complex issues to the point of inanity, and spends little time on what I felt were the most difficult points to defend.
Basically, I didn’t like his philosophizing because it was, well, philosophizing. The major challenge for writers of philosophy is to engage both those sympathetic towards their position and also those who are most critical. This is really hard to do when you’re just talking to the page, since you don’t have the benefit of conversational give-and-take with your opponents to get a sense of exactly what you have to rebut. It is immensely frustrating to try to follow a philosophical argument when it feels like the author keeps trying to slip statements in without seriously considering them.
I know that this is something of an unfortunate reality about any sort of argument, since you need to assume that some things don’t need supporting; your argument has to “bottom out” at some level or else you’d spend eternity justifying the last thing you said.
Anyway, the worst example of this in The Case for Christianity was (for me, as a cognitive scientist) when Lewis blithely declaims that since a) we have special access to what’s going on in our minds (not heads!) and b) anything that only has our behavior to go by (which, for whatever reason, does not include language!) it follows that…I don’t honestly remember, something about our innate moral compass (whose existence I do not dispute) being God talking to us…if I wasn’t so lazy I’d go and get the book and look this part up.
First of all, I should point out that introspective access (a) is something that I have a big problem with but that, historically at least, has been pretty uncontroversial, so it’s really unfair of me to expect Lewis to defend it. However, excluding language from human behavior is ridiculous, as is the idea that from behavior alone we get no sense of what’s going on inside the heads of others. Au contraire, behavior is the only way we have of even getting to the point where we might attribute mental states to another person.
Like I said, I was really moved by the parts about Christ and salvation, but I was nothing but turned off by the philosophy parts. In fact, I was moved very much in the same way as I am by the soteriological aspects of Buddhism, and perhaps to an even greater extent, since Christianity is something that I’ve always wanted to “get,” but never really felt like I could. Perhaps Lewis’s philosophizing, irksome as I find it, makes me more receptive to his soteriological message.
I went to Borders yesterday with Mom and Jeff to pick out a birthday gift for my dad, and, somewhat predictably, found myself spending more time pulling books off the shelf that I was interested in than anything else. High on the list of things I’d like to read soon are Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse, both by Jared Diamond and both appealing to the same facet of my personality the led me to devour Empires of the Word last summer and almost sign up for “The Rise and Fall of Civilizations” last fall. In the same vein as Empires, a chatty guy at Tunnel City last summer suggested The Stories of English, and I’ve been meaning to check out for a while, too. Boing Boing suggests both Everything is Miscellaneous (David Weinberger) and The Wisdom of Crowds (James Surowiecki) (BB links 1 and 2), which both look like interesting engagements with the consequences of the Web2.0-ification of our society. In The Embodied Mind this past semester we were assigned bits and pieces of Mind in Life (Evan Thompson), which is all about biology, phenomenology and cognitive science, and while perhaps a little ambitious for summer reading, is something I’d like to spend some time with eventually. Rounding out the list on a slightly lighter note is a wonderful little book call An Adventurer’s Guide to Number Theory (Richard Friedberg) which I pulled off my bookshelf today, Hungry Planet (Peter Menzal and Faith D’Aluisio) which shows photos of families and their weekly foodstuffs from all over the world (link to photo essay on Time site), and Do Andriods Dream of Electric Sheep? (Phillip Dick), the book that Bladerunner was based on.
Phew! Hopefully I’ll be able to make a dent in that list over the summer. Tomorrow I’m off to good ol’ Williamstown, for another summer of frolicking in the lab and reading and writing. Tonight I’m baking bread with Nate, and this afternoon I grabbed coffee with Jue and went “early back to school shopping” with Mom, netting some badly-needed jeans and shorts and beautiful cleats (less badly-needed, but half off! yes!). Needless to say I’m going to miss being home terribly, especially my family and the dog, but it’ll be good to see Ruth and other Williams folk and maybe start feeling more productive. And now I’m off adventuring in Breadland!
Minnesota! I am happily ensconsed in my sister’s dorm room at lovely Macalester College, in balmy, tropical St. Paul, Minnesota. The last two and a half days consisted of bumming around Cambridge, catching up with Boston friends, and playing Super Smash Bros. with Jue and company. Before that was a nice, low-key celebration of my birthday on Monday with the family (as part of which I received both The Bread Bible and The Joy of Cooking!). However, getting home was probably one of the most harrowing experiences of my entire life, and I am now absolutely convinced of the utter insanity of trying to travel in a snowstorm (never mind in rural New England). The icing on the cake is that, two days before, it was 70˚ and sunny in Williamstown—welcome to March in New England, folks.
I really need this break, and am really enjoying traveling and doing very little that’s productive. This semester is kicking my butt a lot harder than I predicted, so it’s nice to get away from the cycle of waiting till the last minute to do everything, get caught up on my reading and sleep, spend some quality time with my family, and remember why I love school so much so that I’m actually excited to go back and power through the rest of this semester. On a more optimistic note, I think I’m getting over the vague, righteous anger that I’ve been struggling with recently, which I’m going to interpret as a sign that I’m feeling more comfortable with the material we’re covering in Consciousness. I’m still feeling somewhat displeased with my math class(es), but I killed my cryptography midterm, and knot theory is getting a little more rigorous/formal (or I’m getting used to drawing pictures for proofs…), so I guess I shouldn’t worry.
Anyway, I’m very much looking forward to hanging out at home next week, cooking, baking, and playing Ocarina of Time (only the best video game ever). And, hopefully, at the end of that I’ll be ready to hit the books with renewed vigor.
I’m worried about consciousness. Really worried. I’m not worried about consciousness being too “hard” a problem for science to handle. If it makes a difference, I think that there is no such hard problem, just like there’s no “hard” problem about what makes living things live, no elan vital, once you understand well enough all of the little processes involved in living. No, I’m worried that statements like this one have a place in serious, scholarly discourse about consciousness:
[...] we can arguably imagine someone psychologically identical to me who experiences something different. (Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Unified Theory p. 21)
By way of clarification, what Chalmers means when he says “psychological” is “the concept of mind as the causal or explanatory basis for behavior.” (p. 11). Well, David J. Chalmers, I for one CANNOT imagine such a situation. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. I invite you, dear reader, to attempt a similar thought experiment. Imagine me, sitting here, typing these somewhat angry words, but instead feeling something totally different than what I am really feeling right now (whatever that means). I can’t do it, and if you can you must have some sort of imaginative (or delusional) capacity that I am lacking. Read on, o intrepid reader
I spent the better part of this evening reading bits and pieces of Second Nature, the book about neuroscience and epistemology I mentioned earlier (and found out about here) and Gödel, Escher, Bach and drinking the last of my delicious delicious Darjeeling tea. The rest of the day was spent mostly in the LEGO lab, modding our robot’s ineffectual treads with duct tape (surprisingly effective!), getting it through the maze, finessing the obstacle avoidance program, adding light sensors, programming it to follow a line on the ground, and finally taking the whole thing apart and rebuilding the chassis to be a good 30% bigger.
What time I didn’t spend in the lab today was spent ice skating with Ruth, which was absolutely wonderful, and tomorrow I’ll be hiking and it’s supposed to be chilly and maybe a little bit snowy, so I’m looking forward to that quite a bit. Speaking of Ruth, as of yesterday it has been exactly one year since we entered into that most holy of contracts, the Facebook “In a relationship” status. We exchanged knitted gifts, and had Thai food, and it was lovely. Speaking of knitted items, over break I read a post on Boing Boing about knitting or crocheting mathematically interesting objects, like hyperbolic planes (picture at right) and moebius strips, and knew right away that I had to knit myself a moebius band. After much frustration and grunting and cursing, I finally succeeded in producing a somewhat silly looking thing that I then proceeded to wear as a headband for the better part of New Year’s Eve.
And oh! our first entry-reunion broomball game of the year was a rousing success, with the Ice Vampires pulling through to defeat Dodd House 3-1. Huzzah! I’m also currently drooling over the iPhone…so sue me, I have a soft spot for tiny, black, shiny, light-up techno-thingies with smooooth user interfaces, especially when they’re being cradled by Steve Jobs.
Eep! A few more cool things: a site that estimates how many people there are in the US of A that have any particular name. Apparently there are somewhere around 31 David Kleinschmidts out there. I’ve also resolved to write my own script for generating knitting patterns based on cellular automata, inspired by the project described here. Last but not least, the site that I got my moebius band patter from and which has a bunch of cool math/knitting links, and also a blog called Math4Knitters (‘nuf said).
A little while ago I posted here the question of what existence and physical instantiation have in common, and recently the Times ran a piece about emergence and free will (now behind a paywall, grumble grumble), which got me (and Jue, too) thinking about this stuff some more. I think I’m sort of ready to address the question of existence a little more directly now, even though I have a sneaking suspicion that very soon I will not agree anymore with what I’m about to say.
Cutting to the chase, I think that the phenomenon of emergence indicates pretty strongly that the notion of objective existence is a sort of fallacy. If something like a mind can be said to exist, a mind that is, as far as we can tell just the very complex interaction between the brain, body and environment, who’s to say where the cutoff point for existence is, in terms of complexity? Any possible answer is going to be at worst arbitrary, and at best based on some relevant but still subjective benchmark, and this fuzziness seems to me to suggest a sort of Darwinistic pragmatism inherent in our notion of existence. What makes a thing a thing is not some sort of inherent “object-ness” that it possesses, but rather that the sort of categorical segmentation that it is a part of is relevant in some way to helping us go about our daily business. The illusion of the universality of these conceptual divisions might come from to homogenizing influence of culture and socialization, or perhaps from that same source that gives us our feeling of free will. The important thing is that, when we talk about things those things are always always conceptual, and concepts are inherently subjective, not symbols referring to some distinct object that exists independently of the thinker.
Of course at this point I really need to point out how wrong this account is starting to feel, maybe because it’s a sort of circular argument (using the emergence of things from the complex interactions of things to disprove the possibility of any distinct things actually existing!) or maybe because it gives me the willies to imagine that I’m just this disembodied mind floating in the void making up stories. The sort of world-coming-apart-at-the-seams feeling that trying to put this down on paper also strongly suggests that I’m either headed in some manner of productive direction or just completely and utterly misled.
I guess what I’m trying to get at is that the peculiar role of emergent phenomena in the things we count as existent objects is a pretty good indicator that making the division between trying to understand things holistically (strong emergence) or reductionistically (no real emergence at all) isn’t going to give us any analytical leverage. It took me a few years, but I think that that is one of the central points that Hofstadter is making in GEB: underlying the distinction between holism and reductionism is this sneaking suspicion that that distinction is not a meaningful one, and that we need to utter the magic word of “mu,” un-ask the question, and try to figure out what prompted us to ask the question in the first place.
Anyway! That’s about all of that I can take right now, so I’m throwing up my hands and throwing this question out again: what role does the notion of concepts as symbols referring to objects that exist independently of the symbols have in an understanding of reality?
my name is dave
and this is my blog.
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