Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern, Hofstadter. Non-fiction.
Hofstadter, of Gödel, Escher, Bach fame, here collects his Scientific American columns, along with other writings. He explores the nature of intelligence, the meaning of "I" (the pronoun), what it means to recognize "i" (the letter), and generally the nature of cognition. He is (or was, as of 1985, when this was published) an unrepentant believer in strong AI, and is sometimes harshly critical of the direction of AI research. I share many of his objections to the AI establishment that gave us "Expert Systems" (really "novice systems"), and am happy to have such a cogent voice articulating what is right and wrong with how we think about thinking.
A recurring theme in the work is the madness represented by the nuclear arms race, and I can't help but wonder whether he continues to see nuclear conflict as the most pressing danger that we're ignoring, or if (as I'd like to imagine) he's more troubled by the attack on our civil rights that began in earnest just over five years ago.
I first started this book when it was new, and it took me a good few months to get through it this time (though it was not my bus reading), but I'm glad to have taken the time.
A digression on "novice systems": I attended a talk given by Hubert Dreyfus sometime probably in 1985 or 1986. He was billed as an AI critic, but he primarily criticized the same dead-end (if your goal is to create a thinking machine) research avenues that Hofstadter criticizes in MT, implying they were the best that AI researchers had to offer. Dreyfus didn't address in his talk the approach advocated by Hofstadter (I will summarize this as saying that you don't necessarily need to model every synapse, but you do need to allow/force the cognitive functions to emerge from lower-level, largely deterministic (Hofstadter says non-deterministic, but I don't know whether we disagree or are talking about different things or different aspects of the same thing), interactions that you do model—Dreyfus seems to believe that you would also need your machine to have a body and culture like ours, but I don't buy that), but I was interested to find myself agreeing so frequently with someone whose fundamental premise was diametrically opposed to my own, at least nominally. One point Dreyfus made that I found particularly compelling was that expert systems (really just rule-based decision engines, however elaborate) have more in common with the way novices perform tasks than the way experts perform them. Experts don't consult a set of rules to determine what to do next: they have completely incorporated any rules that they started with, and have expanded them with the experience they gained as they were becoming experts. Even when an expert gives you a rule for why she did something, it is almost always derived a posteriori, rather than truly representing the decision factor. Hence "novice systems".
The Last Days, Westerfeld. Yes. This is nominally a sequel to Peeps, but I found it interesting to imagine reading it without having read Peeps. Each gives what could be premature insight into the events of the other, though, so perhaps the ideal situation would be to read each with no memory of the other.
Dan Bern (he has a new album out) on what I look for in writing:
The writers that I love, some of them are songwriters, but a lot of them are story writers. The best of the lot, at least my favorite ones, are not writers that write in florid strokes so much as very vivid ones, like James Thurber and Ring Lardner, Charles Bukowski, John Fante, Hemingway. They're not writers who are so in love with their own words; the picture's what's important.When I was making this record, New American Language, it was like, "Let's be in service to the song -- what do the songs want, what does the story want, what do the themes want?" It's hard to get out of your own way. When people are trying to master their craft, it's more about learning to get out of the way.
The Adventures of Polo, Faller
Very sweet and fun wordless adventures of Polo the dog. Three stars.
The Rules of Survival, Werlin (Y)
A young man narrates to his much younger sister all of the games he played and sacrifices he made to protect her from their psychotic mother. Very well done. Four stars.
Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, Cohen and Levithan (Y)
Alternating his and hers voices of a first meeting and falling madly in love being up all night in punk-rock New York City. Romantic and steamy. Four stars.
World War Z, Brooks
This one is jumping right onto my best-of-the-year list, fantastic reportage on the ten-year zombie war, in the voices of those in the thick of it. Five stars.
Fragile Things, Gaiman. Yes. Not all of the stories collected here are gems, but most of them are very good, and only one or two write checks that the effort Gaiman put into them does not cover.
A lovely Britishey source of free printable book plates by such nifty illustrators as Raymond Briggs and Posey Simmonds.
A really great story about a really great grandfather, with illustrations.
After reading her name, I expected Deborah Jakubs to look like Deborah Jacobs but, you know, with a goatee and a gold sash.