Tuesday, August 19, 2003 :::
 
The Madness Season by C. S. Friedman

This is a pretty good SF book, not the sort that you finish with explosions going off in your head, but the sort that you are turning the pages at the end. Basic premise is that Earth was conquered by aliens who are all connected by an overmind, and humans, along with various other alien species, are slaves. One of the viewpoint characters is a vampire/shapeshifter but still on the side of humans. There are some cool aliens with a variety of bizarrely different features and an exciting story, but I do wish that alien races other than the humans had been organising to overthrow the alien conquerors.


::: posted by Tracy at Tuesday, August 19, 2003

 
I know I've been away for a bit. I've been exploring the advantages of replacing the word "but" by "and". "Hemi has primary responsibility but Hossam has done all the work" becomes "Hemi has primary responsibility and Hossam has provided the figures" if you don't want to land any blame on poor Hemi who was off on bereavement leave for the last week. My Writing Clear English teacher told me about that clever trick two years ago, and but I've only just started using it, amazing how long it took me to figure out how wonderful and easy it is.

::: posted by Tracy at Tuesday, August 19, 2003

Tuesday, August 05, 2003 :::
 
For a while now I've been reading bits from the New Urbanists, from critics of modern architecture, etc, and I've been wanting to read a good defence of modern architecture to see the other side. Unfortunately this post by acdouglas (via City Comforts) isn't it. His description of buildings by Traditionalist, New-Traditionalist, etc, movements as "little more than nostalgic, picture-postcard-pretty, gussied-up historical copies" may or may not be true, but as an observer inclined slightly towards the traditional forms but definitely not of rigid mind, this description does not strike me as an argument that justifies his claim that "they're all irredeemably dreadful as architecture".

He then says that genuine architecture must always be art first and building second. If he wants to define architecture that way, he is welcome, my dictionary defines architecture as "art or science of building, thing built, structure, style of building, construction", but that does not defend particular architecture movements against criticisms that they have produced unpleasant areas to live in, and bad art. Just because something is art, doesn't mean that is good.

So then he goes onto say that common man's opinion of art is irrelevant:

For the same reason that not even the most rabid populist would so much as think of suggesting that the opinion of the common man be consulted and incorporated in the actual construction of those buildings, or in, say, the design of a rocket ship to Mars, or in the methods used in the diagnosing and treatment of a lethal new disease. In such cases, we want the opinion of gifted specialists -- trained, qualified, and experienced experts -- to prevail at all times: the most gifted, the best trained, the best qualified, and the most experienced possible. We want that because these specialists know their stuff and the common man doesn't. Not to put too fine a point on it, in matters such as these the common man is an ignoramus.

ACDouglas attempts to confuse the issue here by saying that the common man should not be involved in the construction of buildings, or the design of a rocket ship to Mars, or the diagnosing or treatment of a new disease. However most of these issues are not directly equivalent to the issue of whether ordinary people should be consulted on the issues of values or aesthetics. There is a difference between being an expert on construction, and having a good opinion on what that construction should look like, between designing a rocket ship and having a say in whether that rocket ship should go to Mars or if the resources should be spent on an expedition to another planet, or on treating a new disease.

And of course doctors do generally consult laypeople in the diagnosis or treatment of diseases, new or not. The most expert doctor in the world is not equipped with mind-reading abilities that allow them to divine what every patient is feeling and suffering from, but have to wait until the patient tells them. Even if someone is brought into the emergency ward with a pickaxe imbedded in their foot doctors prefer to have the patient conscious so they can have conversations with them about when it happened, where it happened, are they allergic to anything, etc, etc. Medical trials are dependent on laypeople to report such matters as whether pain has decreased, or any side-effects induced by the medication. Researchers generally set up structured ways of gathering this information, such as double-blind trials, but the layperson, or "the common man" must be consulted.

And the question of what looks good to a person is as unobservable by someone else as whether a patient is in pain. If acdouglas went to a doctor complaining of migraines, would he be relieved of his pain by the doctor annoucing, without even talking to him, that he was an ignoramus in terms of nerve endings and only specialists should be involved in making all decisions about his case - including whether he was feeling pain or not?

If anyone knows of a better defense of modern architecture than this, please let me know.





::: posted by Tracy at Tuesday, August 05, 2003

Monday, July 28, 2003 :::
 
How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker

Got this out of the library because I had to place a reserve on The Blank Slate. The great thing about Steven Pinker's writing is that he's not only full of scientific facts, he takes you through how these facts and theories are put together, tested, etc. The scientific theories in this book get very subtle, a major theme of the book is how we see (not physically, but how our brain makes sense of what the eye sends it), and he identifies various ways in which our brains manage to do this. He also ties this all in with evolutionary theory, what did we need out there on the savannah, and also considers the advantages of evolution in conjunction with learning - because we can learn we can solve much harder problems than evolution could solve by itself. Another good book to read.

::: posted by Tracy at Monday, July 28, 2003

Tuesday, July 22, 2003 :::
 
Glory Season by David Brin

This is quite a good fantasy book, the characters are real, the plot interesting and the world has a good twist. The set up is that this is a planet that was settled by women, and presumably a few men, trying to lower the influence of sex and male violence, and prepared to use genetic engineering to do it. Women have children that are identical clones of their own during the winter on this planet, and have mixed gene children (vars) (of which about a quarter are male) during summer. The clones, or winter-born continue in their mother's lives, while the vars have to go out and find their own way, boys generally go into various guilds, while girls are very much alone. David Brin explores this idea and the effect on society carefully, and seeks to set things up so that the system would be stable. However there seems an inherent instability in there that he hasn't addressed. The reasons that drove life to reproduce sexually exclusively in the past. The families of identical women strike me as unlikely to be able to respond to change as well as more mixed families. They do not appear to form close relationships with non-genetically identical people, so they lack the strengths and broader ranges of knowledge that we get from our marriages, friendships and relatives. And they are more exposed to all being wiped out by the same disease. The book wasn't convincing enough that the clones would be able to hold their own against other competitors long enough to build the lasting families seen in Brin's world.

But on the whole a good book, I recommend you read it.

::: posted by Tracy at Tuesday, July 22, 2003

Sunday, July 13, 2003 :::
 
The Nantucket Diet Murders by Virginia Rich

In case the title didn't tell you, this is a murder mystery. One of those annoying ones where I had the thought that should have led me to the murderer (hmm, that's a bit odd that he'd have such a dangerous set-up) but didn't.

A bit annoying though to read about women living in grand houses on Nantucket worrying about money. I find it kind of hard being sympathetic about that sort, on the other hand I'm attracted to reading about those lifestyles, so I guess it's a cross.

::: posted by Tracy at Sunday, July 13, 2003

 
House of Cards: Psychology and Psychotherapy Build On Myth by Robyn M Dawes

This is a money-saving book. It has thoroughly convinced me that if I ever feel a need for therapy, any minimally trained therapist is likely to do as good a job as a psychologist dripping degrees, which should be worth at least $100 an hour.

Mr Dawes gathers various pieces of evidence that many clinical psychologists' theories are not based on scientific research, or directly contradict research, such as repressed memories, or Rorschach Ink Blot Tests. Having read Scott Armstrong's Long-Range Forecasting it was interesting to see the similarity between psychologists' mistakes and forecasters, including a tendency to be over-confident in the accuracy of their forecasts and for people using intuition to do repeatedly worse than rough models.

In terms of books about how we think, and how we fool ourselves, I think that Armstrong's is better for being more general, and anyone interested in the topic should read that, but Hawes is an interesting and depressing one, it's something that I think all criminal judges should read.

::: posted by Tracy at Sunday, July 13, 2003