Sandy

Terrible. I was expecting a fun book full of cool spy stuff, and instead got a boring treatise on how to set up Microsoft Word documents for your customers, and how to deal with customer relations while doing pen testing. The actual spy stuff consists of “use a carpet to get over barbed wire fence”, “use a big mylar sheet stretched over a canvas to defeat motion sensors”, and “wear pieces of carpet over your shoes.”

So what do we get? Unhelpful and tortured acronyms like REDTEAMOPSEC, where, for example, the E stands for “Engage in Reconnaissance.” Yeah, that's memorable.

I picked this up mostly as a joke after learning that iced coffee and walking quickly are queer symbols. While researching whether or not I was queer for liking iced coffee (and wondering if this is what my San Francisco friends meant when they said they were queer,) I came across this book, and was surprised to learn that there is a THEORY behind being queer! Fascinating!

After a quick wikipedia-job on queer theory that didn't prove to be helpful in the least, I thought I should probably read a book on the topic. Either it would be informative, or it would be further evidence that the humanities are full of crazy people spouting off on “theories” that are completely impenetrable – win/win, really.

So I dove in during a long bus ride. And I was pleasantly surprised! Wilchins makes a good argument that it's stupid to draw strong dichotomies based on sexuality. Does it make a man a homosexual if he thinks about kissing another man? Not only is this not right, argues Wilchins, it's not even wrong. These categories are useful insofar as they help us predict the future, but they are not helpful as identifiers.

I don't remember much else about the book. I ran out of steam on it. I never intended to abandon it, but I did, and I have no desire to read more. Queer Theory was significantly less shit than I was expecting it to be! I remember being impressed with a few of the arguments while reading it, but damned if I can remember what they are now.

EDIT: 2022 I revisited this book because it was on my list of unfinished books on my kindle. The second time around it was worse.

COmPuTErS ARE lOOmS thAT Weave INformATion

You can tell the Essinger really likes this metaphor because he beats it to death.

It's not a great book. It spends a paragraph talking about the Jacquard loom, and then spends a chapter talking about his dad, and then three chapters talking about Babbage, and then zooms through IBM. There's a teensy mension of Turing, but none of Church, or von Neumann, or Hopper, or of Bell Labs, or anything like that. It's just a collection of people who like punch cards and their dads. Lots of dads.

The book has a frustrating habit of quoting other biographies, and telling us how nothing is known about these people, and quoting long passages from Charles Dickens because it was inspired by Babbage, and, of course, about everyone's dad. And the book never seems to be on any of the subject matters' sides — it's often talking about how politically stupid they were, and how its their own fault for these things, and stuff like that. Maybe it's true, but it's not why we're here.

Great, but long as fuck and dries up in the middle. It's just 100 years of history with no commentary — this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened. Weird to see parallels in modern life to things that happened in 1920. This book is definitely worth a read, but maybe not as your primary book.

It's a fun book that overstays its welcome. While reading Feynman's outgoing correspondence is a great way to get a feeling for the man behind the anecdotes, half of the book is other people's letters to Feynman! I tried to read this book exclusively, all in one go, but that was JUST TOO MUCH FEYNMAN. Instead, it works much better as a bathroom reader, or something that you can pick up and put down for a few pages at a time.

I came away from this book thinking I really need to up my letter writing skills.

An excellent book, which brings forth visions of futures that never were. Written in the late 70s, this book takes denotational semantics seriously, and harps on the difficulties which arise from the operational and axiomatic approaches—both of which, unfortunately, are much more popular now than their denotational counterpart.

There's a lot going on here. Some of it is delightful historical notes about computing, like early computers which drew their text backwards, to which the solution was to mirror everything, and then put a physical window in the back of the computer for the nerds to read their (now reversed) waveforms through. Or about how dynamic scoping, in all its awfulness, was brought about because it has an easy and obvious implementation when you're writing an interpreter.

But where the book really shines is in all the MATH. Oh my god. Stoy gives us structural inductive arguments (yay!) and contrasts them against induction on the runtime (which can only ever be shown to have not yet gone wrong, but never to have actually produced the right answer.) I finally got a meaningful answer to what exactly a least-fixed point is (one function is “less” than another if it is defined on fewer inputs, thus the least fixed point is the one that is bottom in as many places as possible.)

Furthermore, there's a great deal of cool representation stuff going on. Stoy points out that we have never actually seen a function, only ever representations (closed form algorithms) of them. It's obvious when it's pointed out, but I'd never thought of the lambda calculus as a REPRESENTATION OF FUNCTIONS before. The book constructs a semantics of the lambda calculus and shows why exactly it models functions, with the entire thing being built out of lattices, with theory that I suspect is where propagators also came from.

Denotational Semantics, the book, and sadly, the ideas in it, is rather dated at this point. But that's a huge amount of the charm. Our field has gone the wrong direction and it can be hard to see the context we exist in. Highly recommended.

This is the musical theory aimed at grade 8 RCM players? Assuming this book is a representative sample, music theory is in a bad, bad place. Because this book is absolute drivel. In the hundred-or-so-pages, I only spotted two actual occurrences of anything you could call “theory.” Instead, Celebrate Theory is full of inane exercises like “provide an Italian term for ‘lively'.”

Worse, it has perfunctory explanations like “contrast can be achieved in a variety of ways, including changes to the rhythm, melody, or harmony. To create a pleasing effect, composers strive for balance between contrast and unity.” And that's all that Celebrate Theory has to say about THAT topic.

I don't know what's harder to believe; that music theory is in such a bad place, or that I actually spent $50 on this piece of shit.

I picked this up on someone's recommendation that I have now completely forgotten, with the pitch being “it gives an extremely accurate description of what it feels like to be each sex.” My partner and I started reading it with that in mind, thinking we might gain some deep understanding into one of life's deeper mysteries. My partner couldn't hack it, and put it down after a chapter or two.

Foolishly, I persevered. In retrospect, I wish I had had the wisdom that my partner did—recognizing a lost cause when I was presented with one.

Fundamentally, there are three things wrong with this book: it is chocked full of factual errors, it is based on lots of extremely suspicious psychology research, and its central thesis depends firmly on group selection. We'll go through these in order.


## Bad Facts

There are lots of (often unimportant) claims in this book that are simply wrong. For example:

> The highly successful Japanese Pokemon card series presents another example, with cards with names such as Enraged Muka Muka, Infernal Incinerator, Creeping Doom Mantra, Malice Doll of Demise, Indomitable Fighter Lei Lei, Cyber Archfiend, Terrorking Salmon, Tribe-Infecting Virus, Nightmare's Steelcage, Invitation to a Dark Sleep, Mad Sword Beast, Dark Driceratops, Gross Ghost of Fled Dreams, Pitch-Black Warwolf, and Dragon Zombie.

These don't sound like any Pokemon I've ever heard of. A little googling shows that these are in fact Yu-Gi-Oh cards. Or how about this one:

> Massively multiple online role-playing computer games, such as the hugely popular World of Warcraft, allow many players armed only with a computer to cooperate from around the world to hunt down and kill one another, team against team, in completely realistic contexts.

I think it's hard to call pretending to be an Orcish Death Knight a “completely realistic context.”

On the topic of things that should have been caught by an editor, we have this gem:

> If another female requires a better territory, more food, or assistance fighting a competitor or predator, a high-status female can lend a helping hand, or mouth or foot.

Lending a mouth doesn't seem like the sort of thing that would help someone else get more food.

> A study in the US Midwest found that bullying followed a predictable pattern. High-status boys bullied low-status boys. In turn, low-status boys bullied high-status girls.

As a low-status boy in school, who was friends with a lot of other low-status boys, there wasn't any bullying of high-status girls. In fact, we were the ones being bullied by high-status girls. My female friends say they never saw any of this bullying of high-status girls either. Of course, this doesn't prove anything, but it certainly doesn't pass the sniff test.

Then there's lots of weird claims like this one:

> If another man is trying to compete, he generally does it in public. He openly bests his competitor, then helps himself to his competitor's food—or his wife.

uhhhh.... that... doesn't seem to be... how competition works in any part of the world I've ever come across...

There is lots of crap stuff like this in the book. None of them really matter, but they do not lend credence to Benenson. If I can't trust her to spot that role-playing as an elf who must drink blood to strengthen his magic might not be realistic, or that men don't actually compete with their wives as collateral, then why should I trust anything else she has to say? Gell-mann amnesia can only take you so far, and we passed that exit a long time ago.


## Very Suspicious Science

There are lots of claims in this book that I highlighted thinking WTF. I didn't open up any of the citations, but a lot of the things referenced didn't seem to be relevant to the point at hand. I don't have any examples right now, unfortunately, and I'm too lazy to pull them up. But, in reading the titles, I also read the years, and almost all of the WTF-enough citations I cared to click on were from the 90s. I'd like to point out that the replication crisis came to our attention in the early 2010s, and it seems likely that it was precipitated by lots of bad research in the 90s.

It's hard to say here whether this is representative of all the citations in the book, or merely the most WTF ones. Nevertheless, here are some quotes from the book I took umbrage with, and my commentary on why.

> The ratio of young men (15–29 years) to older men (30+ years) in a country predicts quite accurately war-related fatalities. In their study of 88 countries from all over the world, Christian Mesquida and Neil Wiener [51] showed that as this ratio of young to older men increases, the number of fatalities during conflicts increases enormously.

I hope Benenson is misquoting the study here, because if not, she's saying “a country that has more young men has more causalities in war.” This is presented as a knock-down argument for why men are more violent and “warrior-oriented” than women. Alas, as stated it forgets to account for the fact that if you have more young men, you can send more of them into war. If you have more people at war, more people are going to get shot at, and there will be more casualties than if you had fewer people at war.

This book has lots of examples of misunderstanding data and of ignoring obvious confounders. Like the following:

> Boys raised [in an Israeli orphanage] were more likely to participate in the riskiest and most violent aspects of military service. A full 54% of them volunteered for units with fighting requirements, whereas only 16% of boys raised with their own families did so. Boys raised [in an Israeli orphanage] also displayed the most valor in battle. It is no accident that these were boys who were raised with other boys and away from their mothers.

The claim here is that the presence of women makes men less violent. Maybe. Or maybe it's just that people without families or normal upbringings have less to live for, and valor is the obvious thing to strive for if you don't have many ties to safety or much in the way of prospects back in the civilian world.

There is more like this.

> In business and science, high-status women invest less than high-status men in lower-status same-sex individuals [181, 182, 4]. Recently, my colleagues and I asked young women and men how much money they would share with a less powerful same-sex ally with whom they had worked on a joint project. Women gave much less than men did.

Notice the sleight of hand here. They asked how much people would share; they didn't actually observe people sharing. But the conclusion is that women give much less than men do. Again, I haven't read the study, and maybe it fares better than its presentation here, but given the rest of the red flags in this book, I have no reason to expect it to.

Occasionally, the book gifts us a gem like this one:

> Unsurprisingly, men are more likely to get divorced when they have been married longer, whereas the opposite is true for women.

Unless Benenson is making unrelated commentary on homosexual marriage in the midst of her point, this claim is not even wrong. Men and women are married together, for the same amount of time, and therefore they get divorced after the same amount of marriage.


## Weird Stereotypical Sexism

I'm hesitant to use the word “boomer” immediately under a subheading of “weird stereotypes,” but I'm going to do it anyway. This book has all sorts of weird stereotypes that I've never heard anyone actually espouse, except maybe in meme format on Facebook shared by embarrassing relatives. Things like:

> Probably almost every mother who has ever lived has screamed in her home and commanded, insulted, made fun of, and otherwise acted superior to her family members at times.

My mom didn't. Either this is a knock-down refutation, or Benenson isn't actually saying anything here and has a motte and bailey where she can always retreat to “at times.”

A personal favorite of mine is Benenson's weird fixation on the fact that men are forgetful, irresponsible, and love SPORTS:

> Even where fathers take care of children, many are not certain how old their child is, what day their child was born, where to find their child's doctor, or the name of their child's teacher [14]. None of these fathers, however, has any memory problems when it comes to recalling the names, ages, and statistics of the players on their favorite sports team.

and

> A careful inspection shows that fathers can be distractible when it comes to children. While a father may dutifully push his baby's carriage, his attention is easily distracted by a pretty girl walking by, deliberations with fellow fathers about last night's baseball game, or a new business deal.

and

> Boys, regardless of whether they are educated, grow up to be men, who just don't invest as much in their families. Often, men will choose to spend their money on alcohol and tobacco or leisure activities as much as on their families.

It's comical how meme-y these ideas are.


## Bonus Taylor Swift

Presented unironically:

> Jenny wasn't really interested in a boyfriend, but she still like hanging out with the guys. Mostly she liked to play soccer and basketball with them after school. She liked to wear jeans and T-shirts instead of make-up and miniskirts.


## Group Selection

Let's get down to brass tacks. While it's fun to dunk on this book, this is where the serious structural problems in the argument rear their ugly head. Paraphrasing the synopsis of the book in a few sentences:

> Men and women survive in life via different skills. These different skills are so in-grained that they are biological in nature.
>
> Women are responsible for raising children, and thus have evolved to take good care of themselves and others. This involves WORRYING A LOT.
>
> Men, on the other hand, are all about WAR and FIGHTING ENEMIES. They can impregnate lots of women with very little work, and therefore can dedicate the rest of their energy to fending off enemies for the good of the tribe.

Ignoring the fact that the conclusions don't stem from the premise (tending children is one more thing to worry about, and thus lowers your chance of survival, and fighting is necessarily bad for your health) there is a keen misunderstanding of evolution at play here.

In particular, the argument here that men are warriors because they can get someone pregnant and then lay down their lives for the good of the group is repeatedly hammered home throughout the book:

> A young man will sacrifice his life, most immediately for the other young men in his group who are standing right next to him in battle. That is what his emotions tell him [1, 17, 18]. That is what I believe allows his genes to survive. If he survives, his genes will be more likely to be passed down to his children. If he dies but his community survives, then at least some of his genes, those residing in his closest family members, will be passed down to his nieces and nephews.

and

> If you belong to a boys' group, your allies may not remember your birthday, but they know very well if you can run fast, hit well, respect rules, and make good decisions. They may be competitors, but when things get tough, they're also the ones who will protect you and root for you, and maybe even die for you.

Different, but along the same line:

> [Fathers] know the mother of their children will almost always be there for the children. Of course, around the world, stealing another man's wife or girlfriend is probably the number one cause of murder within a community [192], even in hunter-gatherer societies [22]. But a man doesn't worry as much about this, as long as his wife can care for his children.

This book is an excellent book on what exactly is going on in music, and why what leads to music that our brains are capable of parsing as music. It discusses the structure of melody, and makes the spicy claim that harmony is all bullshit (arising only due to counterpoint, but not being worth studying on its own.) Melodic lines have structure due to how our brains want continuity, and Westergaard discusses tools for maintaining or breaking that desire of continuity depending on the goals. He gives machinery for parsing music into these underlying operations, or, alternatively, a set of rules for deriving music from basic structure, as well as providing an “interesting-to-humans” metric that closely correlates to the ambiguity and depth of that parse.

I don't know if this book has made my musical skills any better, but it's far and away, hands down the best book I've ever read on music theory. If you've ever been frustrated by the wishywashiness of usual theory that depends on memorizing a billion facts without giving any explanation as to where those facts came from, this is the book for you.

It's a great account of Feynman, and comes off feeling like less of a facade than Surely You're Joking or his other autobiographical works. It's not a life-changing book by any account, but it's a fascinating read for any researcher; in my opinion, the history presented in the book is completely paled by the glimpses we get into the governing dynamics of Feynman's mind.

You're not going to learn any science here, but you might get an inkling into how to actually do science. And that's a wonderful thing.

I bought this book thinking it was a biography of Riemann. It's not. Riemann shows up for a little bit at the beginning, but the vast majority of this book is not about him. Fair enough, allegedly he kept no diary and made no friends, so there's very little known about him. But the title is exceptionally misleading.

My second concern is “who is the intended audience of this book?” Like, it goes through exceptional trouble to explain natural numbers, but a few chapters later assumes you're capable of following difficult arguments requiring calculus over infinite series. It goes on forever about what a matrix is, but then completely glosses over eigenvalues, despite using them heavily for its later arguments. The final chapter is just one huge derivation of a result that nobody outside of analysis would ever care about.

If you're a math hobbiest, this book is going to be too hard for you. If you have a math undergraduate degree, this book is going to be both too hard for you AND immensely boring at the beginning. The history presented is grantedly interesting. I'd suggest just skipping over the math bits regardless of your skill and skimming through the history. Save yourself some time and frustration.

A fun Red Dwarf book, especially so after just slogging through whatever #2 was called. The first third of this book is in a backwards universe where all of the characters' actions need to be interpreted backwards — for example, when they're looking to find their ship and discover it in the woods and need to dig it out a bit, in the normal direction of time they're hiding it. I had weird backwards dreams for a few days while my brain readjusted to thinking about time like this. It was neat.

Part two has fan favorite Ace Rimmer return, who is always a good romp.

And then it sorta falls apart in part three, which is a novelization of the weird western episode. It's fine I guess but is a rather unspectacular ending to an otherwise great book.

Unfortunately, this book is crippled by legal issues. It's clearly censored from what Huang wants to say, alluding to how much trouble he could be in if he actually talks about how to hack the xbox. So the best you're going to get here is how to install an LED, and some theoretical ideas about how one might go about hacking an xbox. I was hoping to see the nuts and bolts behind how this was done, hoping to extrapolate the technique to other domains. But there is no technique, and most of the book is filler on computational complexity, interviews with other people, and a big 20% chapter on the legality of doing any of this in the first place (written by someone else.)

Review 2019-12-21:
I picked this book up again, four and a half years later, while looking for a novel I thought might provide some insight into human heartache. It's a novel about the intersecting sex lives of ~6 people (and a dog, but there is no sex on that front!), set against a backdrop of the Soviet occupation of Czech. It's an amazing read, told by multiple narrators, where seemingly irrelevant details in one story become central themes of another. The Unbearable Lightness of Being is a contemporary classic, and anyone who hasn't read it is doing themselves a great disservice.


Review 2015-06-14:
I don't know what to say about this book. I loved it, but I'm not sure why, nor really what I just finished reading. But yeah, I really liked it.

Fuck everything about this book. It's full of plot holes and a bunch of people who spend their entire time acting stupidly instead of fixing their damn problems – just so the author can wallow in misery porn. Avoid this book unless you're looking for something that'll make you want to shove scissors into your eyes.